


And Everybody's shouting "Which side are you on?"

by VladimirHarkonnen (TheLightdancer)



Series: Sex, Death, and Half-Demon Multiversal Sorceresses [2]
Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 76,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24297481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/VladimirHarkonnen
Summary: In the wake of their threesome with Death, Raven and Starfire's poly relationship is stabler than it was before. Then belated fallout in the wake of Trigon's death brings the presence of archangels, a certain bar owner, a random immortal who thought in a place full of superheroes he was free from the Endless for a time, and the return of a certain Goth woman with an ankh. For most of the Titans this weirdness is the strangest thing since the last run-in with Mad Mod. For Garfield Logan, former member of the Doom Patrol, it's a slightly more active Tuesday.
Relationships: Death of the Endless & Desire of the Endless, Death of the Endless & Lucifer Morningstar (Vertigo Comics), Death of the Endless/Koriand'r (DCU), Dick Grayson/Koriand'r, Koriand'r/Raven (DCU), Mazikeen/Lucifer Morningstar (Vertigo Comics), Raven/Death of the Endless
Series: Sex, Death, and Half-Demon Multiversal Sorceresses [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1754041
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	1. The Superhuman Crew

PROLOGUE:

TWO YEARS AFTER THE THREESOME WITH DEATH OF THE ENDLESS

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 14th 2009, JUMP CITY:

The Titans, now in their early to mid-20s and all save Raven and Starfire (and Victor Stone to a degree but to a much lesser one as he was bequeathed with a Mother Box upgrade courtesy of an unexpected and unwanted teamup with the Justice League when Steppenwolf had pulled a fast one) looking it knew some things never changed in Jump City. Among them was that one of the most annoying and stupid supervillains plaguing the city, Cinderblock, had been pulled out of his wherever he went when he wasn't acting like a less silent version of the Hulk and gone on a rampage. Wally, now the Flash, had saved civilians easily enough and caught the monster's debris hurled in the midst of the rampage.

Donna, Starfire, and Victor alternated between beam blasts from the latter two and direct hard hits from the former. The newly arrived, more youthful than her alternate universe counterpart, Power Girl had spent two years with the team following the strange events of an August two years prior. Her presence was sorely missed as when she'd been on the team there wasn't even a necessity for anyone else to face Cinderblock, a single hit from Power Girl's gloved fist and that was all she wrote, literally. The absence of experience showed as old routines proved slightly balky, though fortunately Cinderblock was too much of a moron to exploit this or even to recognize it. As it was, the balkiness aside, Cinderblock was fairly easily diverted into one of the more rundown areas left since the last major visit from Dr. Light, who'd tried to hijack a local power grid connected to a failed attempt at gentrification that ran into an attack from Blackfire and a group of renegade Tamaraneans and run on. When the fight finally reached here following Cinderblock's broken-down car shot into ruin by Starfire and Cyborg and three brutal punches from Donna Troy, it was a swift and merciless ganging up of the entire set of Titans culminating in Raven forming a set of old telephone poles around his knocked out body to ensure that he couldn't escape if he did wake up.

Satisfied with a job well done, the Titans headed out to Mario's, the old classic pizza joint, with the new fish, Donna, Wally, and Conner in the vanguard and the rest hanging back. For a change, Raven and Starfire were walking hand in hand, Dick currently off of another failed fling with Barbara Gordon and too disenchanted for much, and Gar quite content to let Starfire have the fun of handling Raven in the bedroom while he recuperated from some of her more enthusiastic....fun. Usually they would have flown but the hour and a half battle had tired Raven and Starfire out. It wasn't that long a walk, however, given that the pizza place was only a couple of short blocks.

The day was the usual balmy California summer, and the team was satisfied that with Cinderblock down for the count and the new Dr. Light post the collapse of the brainwashing, who'd made a beeline for Raven and sought to lure her into the abandoned district before getting the most lopsided beatdown in a superhero fight since the Condiment King had tried to take Lois Lane hostage in front of Power Girl, that there would be some nice quality downtime.

The team knew that two years ago something had changed with Raven and Starfire, Raven becoming more well-grounded and freer with various aspects of emotions and in a fuller grasp of her powers to a point she was as often with the League as with the Titans these days. They also knew the rule about the black feathers in Raven and Starfire's room. Changeling hadn't had the old 'Raven bath' in four years until he'd snuck into Raven's room and tried to lift one of the feathers. Her wards flared into a very powerful burst of energy that transformed him from squirrel to bushy-haired cat and Raven immediately teleported into her room and yelled at him and gave him the 'Raven bath' in Bering Bay, and nobody had dared since.

Starfire also had two such feathers and the experience with Gar meant that none of the team, no matter how tempting, had tried to lift one of the feathers to play a prank on someone else....bar Wally, whose attempt to try to zip in to nab one had seen him _also_ take a Raven bath. Pictures of the feathers were not objected to, though no attempts to do anything with them were made. Zatanna had reacted very strangely during a visit to the Tower when she'd sensed their presence and nobody had explained what the fuss was about, though Raven and Starfire simply noted 'magic business.'

Arriving at Mario's, it was Gar who brought up the topic used to talk when there was nothing else much to say "So are those feathers from an Apokolipsian chicken or Thanagar?"

Raven rolled her eyes and munched happily on her vegetarian pizza, as Gar and Wally got into an argument, Gar convinced that a chicken on Apokolips "would be a goddamn Velociraptor" and Wally insisting that the feathers had to be Thanagarian and kept for magic purposes. As a step up on Gar and Vic's old 'meat vs veggies' argument, it was an improvement. For the rest......

Raven looked to Star, swallowing down her bite with a wry grin:

The more things change.

Starfire laughed.

"Yep."

Raven then froze for a moment with her pizza poised near her mouth, her eyes focused on a tall and slim figure with an undeniable resemblance to David Bowie, fresh out of the 80s, save that his hair was a brilliant red. With him was an equally tall woman with her face half marked by a mask that went from hairline to jawline. Her eyes went very, very wide. And still moreso when both of their eyes turned straight toward her and the man smiled with a predatory smile that made her shudder. Great. Her father was now four years in the grave. She was fucking twenty which she'd never expected to reach. And now here was Lucifer Morningstar himself and his crony and lover Mazikeen in Jump City. 

Trigon was powerful and dangerous, and so was she. Lucifer could erase her like a bug if he thought it was funny. Starfire followed her gaze and saw both of them for the first time. Raven knew who Lucifer and Mazikeen were, all Starfire saw was a very, very attractive redhead in a three piece suit and an equally attractive brunette with a face mask that reminded her of the one musical Raven truly enjoyed. Her eyebrow raised, but when the team turned to look at what drew Raven's attention, the two individuals had vanished into thin air.


	2. The Devil Went Down to Jump City:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer Morningstar has come to Jump City, and Control Freak has a very, very bad day.

JUMP CITY, AUGUST 14th, 2009:

Lucifer snorted as he looked around.

"I know she saw me," he grinned at Mazikeen. "The girl who plucked Death's wings."

Mazikeen snorted in turn. "Zhe pluked wingzz but zhe didznt know whaz zu do wiv them."

Lucifer snorted in turn. "No, she's smart. The fools would have taken the feathers and sought to play King of the Mountain with something like Nekron and given the Endless the excuse to do what most of them want to do."

Mazikeen looked at him. "And you? What zoo you want zoo do?"

Lucifer smiled. "Now now, my dear. We've both seen those films. I'm not going to make that mistake of telling my plan where there are eager ears to hear."

The encounter with Raven at the pizza place had been an hour earlier. Since teleporting away, Lucifer had neatly set up the 'franchise' of Lux in Jump City, in truth simply transporting his bar with him and performing a small-scale memory rewrite to make it seem like it had always been a part of it. That had taken five seconds. For him to explore the new place and to make note of the kind of opportunities and dangers, well, that had been fun. In a city of superheroes, like Gotham or Metropolis, enough people took one look at him and Maz to not decide to play with the new fish. It was almost disappointing, as in Metropolis there had been the one fellow who'd tried to go after Lucifer with technology stolen from Apokolips. Superman never did figure out how someone ended up a skeleton screaming with the weapon in question given a nice and suitably sinful new location, but that was the price of people deciding to try to insult the Morningstar with the weapon of a parvenu creature beneath him on a day when he was in a _bad_ mood.

Today, he was in a good one.

And today, that sentence flushed out a fat, sweaty ginger in a leather trench coat and ill-shaven, the kind of look that had led him to prominently emphasize that he did not in fact have Reddit accounts and stayed well away from the site. The man looked at the very suavely dressed Morningstar and snorted.

"Well well, what do we have here? A new stuffed suit supervillain thinking he can take on the Titans, my archnemeses?"

Lucifer cocked his head. The Titans had taken down a suitably impressive global supervillain network, which was about standard for superheroes. They had also taken down and nullified the takeover attempt of Trigon the Terrible, something that would have proven a minor bit of annoyance had he decided to step in personally, but a feat that meant he was curious what kind of team could hold together against such a force, and how an alien refugee had done what he had never imagined possible, namely plucking the wings of Death. He'd suspected if that Burgess fellow had actually captured her that his goal would have been using her true name to let him harvest parts of her and let her go with the bonus of being a Hob Gadling of a different color (and then my would he be disappointed when Desire or Dream encountered him and oopsie, weren't bound to respect the rules with their sister's realm in theirs). By all indications, the Titans were not near the apex of superhero teams, having had one of the aliens from the doomed world there, but only one, and she'd gone on to New York City, to become its major superheroic figure. 

And yet two of the team had pulled off a feat that offered him a great deal of possibility with the Endless. Long ago he'd sworn to destroy Dream, but it had not quite come to pass. Then Death had humiliated him by demonstrating a realm he'd sought to bar her from had her present, though she'd come for the one that now sat on the throne of all existence. He owed her one for that casual display of power and her not even taking his threat as straightforward. A feather of hers, one gifted with a glyph that bound her to service and a second that required her to provide any favor the owner requested?

And for that goal, now, he was near a video store, a surprising relic of the old days that fit the strange divisions of this city that seemed to match Metropolis for ultra-modern technology in some areas and to be a relic of the post-World War II era more backwards than Gotham City in others. The lump in the trenchcoat sneered at him, the whole chain of thought that flitted through Lucifer's head doing so in two seconds of images that flashed in a lightning succession trivially easy for the second most powerful entity in creation.

He was no superhero, he was in truth rather far beyond their pay grade but this would at least be an amusing case of a mountain squashing a flea.

The lump pulled out his remote and said "Behold your darkest nightmares!"

With that Lucifer, Mazikeen, and Control Freak found themselves in of all places, inside the realm of a Television set.

Lucifer found himself in the film Labyrinth, a film he quite enjoyed for the suitably handsome figure who played the main role. He faced the character played by the girl who sought her brother and sighed. He raised his fingers and snapped them and the film that the villain sought to trap him in changed as his smile widened. 

_Control Freak found himself clad in a bright blue shirt and khaki pants, his left hand transformed into a chainsaw, his remote strapped to his side, a shotgun at his back._

_"What the fuck?"_

_The cabin around him groaned in an eerie fashion and he heard moans and howls from the woods._

_"Oh no, oh no. Hell fucking no."_

_He was not going to be Ash in Evil Dead. He hated those movies._

_Reaching for the remote, he heard a deep rumbling voice echoing:_

_**We're gonna get you, we're gonna get you, not another peep, time to go to sleep!** _

_"Oh come on, that was a high pitched voice, if you're going to do this shit, do it right!"_

_The wall behind him shattered with a single light shove and the man in the suit stepped forward, or what had been a man in a suit. Only now his eyes flashed with a flame that terrified Control Freak for the sheer alien nature. The woman was with him too, but she didn't even try to fit in with the movie, just looking at her compatriot strangely._

_"Please, allow me to introduce myself," said the man with a cold sneer. "I'm a man of wealth and taste."_

_As he lifted Control Freak up by his pointer finger, his sneer became a slasher grin to make the Joker's seem mild._

_"I've been around for many and many a long long year, stolen many a man's soul to waste."_

_He blinked._

_"So....you're not just a supervillain, you're a demonic poseur in Raven's territory?" Control Freak started to laugh._

_"No poseur, boy."_

With that the man raised his other finger and snapped them again and suddenly they were in the store, and his control was taken out of his hand and quietly dismantled piece by piece into every single component without much of any difficulty.

"Are you Doctor Manhattan?"

"Do I look blue?"

With that the man casually dropped him, then squatted beside him with a mocking sincerity as his grip on Control Freak's hair remained very powerful indeed.

"Consider this a lesson, boy. I was kinder to you than you deserved and simply contented myself with undoing your creation and dismantling your remote to a point you can pick up the pieces and repair it. Insult me again and the next morning star you'll see will be your last."

With a cryptic smile he walked off with the woman, whistling jauntily. Control Freak had just gotten the last pieces together when the Titans arrived, teleported en masse by Raven.

Carefully pocketing everything in the deeper pocket of his trench coat he shouted "I surrender!"

Raven's next action startled them all. She stepped out and casually yanked him up by her powers hoisting him up by the coat.

_Do you know what happened here?_

"I wanted to scare a way a new villain in town with my gimmick and he just casually rewrote my own programming and took my remote to pieces like a normal colored Dr. Manhattan."

The team froze, looking at each other.

_What did he look like?_

"Like David Bowie, a very young David Bowie, with a three piece suit."

Raven's next words made the pun in the original statement suddenly sink in and the quotation from the song as well:

_You're lucky, then. Few that meet Lucifer and seek to toy with him live to tell the tale. He must have found you funny. Someone has to, I suppose._

With that she snapped her fingers and he was suddenly teleported into the waiting room for supervillains provided specifically for that purpose and Raven's powers.

It was Gar who broke the stunned silence that prevailed for an increasingly uncomfortably long time by scratching his head and saying "I thought your dad was Satan?"

_No, just the physical embodiment of the principle of evil._

Raven sighed.

 _So that_ was _him and his mistress I saw earlier. Dammit._

"How bad is this?" Nightwing's tone of voice was surprisingly confident, though most of the team was bemused and eyes flickered all over the place. "We beat Trigon, what's this guy when we did that?" 

_The Morningstar is the most powerful being in creation, rivaled only by one other. There are only three things in Jump City worth his time and his personal presence._

Her eyes looked to Starfire's and they shared a nod.

_I think it's time I told you about those feathers, the truth about them._

THE OLD TEMPLE OF THE DEMON TRIGON:

This was an unhallowed place, a realm out of the usual laws of physics transplanted from the Malebolge to Jump City, a small realm where the demon had taken his pleasure from a willfully deceived woman and she had born him his singular half-demon offspring. Shadows became as smoke and covered in crimson eyes upon eyes upon eyes. Three burning portals formed, and three entities stepped out, the older children of Trigon, heirs to the fallen kingdom and incapable of deciding upon its rule. The glory of the Malebolge would return, and a way to bargain with this against those two treacherous angels was in their sister's lair.

Three entities stepped out of the portal, the oldest and the tallest and the most physically unique was a yellow-skinned entity with vast horns that stood up straight, and pointed yellow ears. The resemblance to the demon Etrigan was uncanny, and that reason was logical. He was the demon's father, Belial, eldest son of Trigon and due to his son becoming the prototype of a superheroic demon out of the ranks for weakness. He was not the skinniest of the three, that dubious honor that of the gaunt entity next to him with vast projecting cheekbones and tusks that stuck up from his jawline. Ruskoff was nearly as thin as the human Jonathan Crane, but demonic strength did not rely on so straightforward a thing as muscle structure. Of the three he was the most physically powerful and inclined to physical fun and games. 

The leader, hovering over the other two, was the vastest in bulk, twenty-five feet tall in his true height and built accordingly like a massive red gorilla. Ruskoff's hands sparked with the demonic flame that was their inheritance and their birthright and that which made up the Horrors that were the bulk of the vast armies and entities of their circle.

**Here we are, brothers, beneath our sister's lair.**

Skuge hissed:

**Feeble half-breed. Betrayed our kin, left our realm to rot.**

Ruskoff laughed, a booming set of thunderclaps that echoed in the realm beneath the city, though beneath was not quite the applicable term it would do unless otherwise desired.

 **You dismiss her powers too lightly, my brother. We sought to kill our father a thousand times over in the course of our existence. She did so in her first strife against him so utterly his essence is dispersed in a way it can never reform. Her wards pervade this city, though they are designed against him, or demons of other spheres. I think she prefers to forget us, brothers.**

He smiled more coldly.

**Or perhaps what would ward against us would cancel her own power and render the wards that keep our competitors out worthless?**

The other two looked at him curiously.

**If they think our half-sister is dangerous, imagine what they will make of not one entity of Raven's power, but three. She is rightly seen as more powerful than the legacies of the dead world. And we are greater than she, though not quite near our father and it was.....circumstances...that let her banish him. Circumstances that if we are wise, we shall seek to avoid the repetition, having seen that fate that grasped our father in its talons.**

His smile was still more grim as he said:

**They will know we're here. I suspect the one who has our claim, that of the First of the Fallen, that of Shimmering Jimmy, that of Dream of the Endless, and the favor of the Plucked One will be among them. The helm of Nabu, at least. And........the one who abandoned all the circles to run a bar.**

Ruskoff laughed coldly and loudly.

**The Morningstar wants the feathers. Let him have them, let him pursue it. If fortune favors us, brothers, he will draw the focus of the masters of all the circles, the Silent and the Master of Hope. And if fate favors us, he will draw in the Endless and we shall be able to pursue our greater goal sight unseen next to a clash of titans that dwarfs any given universe in this cluster and our sister shall either take her rightful fate as heir to the Malebolge and queen of the Eighth Circle....or we shall gut her and I shall drink from her skull and become king in fact as well as name.**

Belial smiled cynically.

And of our dear nephew should get involved?

**The more of the family the merrier, I say.**

With that they levitated above the scarred and blackened landscape, gauging their sister's wards. Against entities of any other plane the soul would have been rent more terribly than any defeat since Dream had vanquished the Morningstar before all his agents. The very thing that had led him after countless billions of years to abandon his kingdom. Yet against her half-brothers, the wards knew the kind of energy that went into them, and welcomed them like old friends.


	3. Tales within Tales within Tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tattoo becomes a feather, designs begin to unfold. A cultist become a cyborg and former schoolmaster encounters not one but three of the beings he used to worship, and three tales are told in Scheherazade fashion.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

After making the comment on explaining the nature of the feathers, the Titans had collectively found themselves teleported into the meeting room, where Raven stood before them. Her dress was at times the old black of her leotard and the dress that had replaced it, at times white. The old fabric of Azarath that changed colors with mood had been replaced by a new fabric of Raven's own concept derived from the strange events of two years ago. Today it was a brilliant white, reflecting that Raven retained the balance and wholeness that had become her norm. The last year of her old imbalance was that of the struggle against the Brotherhood of Evil. A few months after she had left a hasty note in her room and teleported to parts unknown, returning clad in a long white dress, equally white flats, and a very birdlike hood and referring to meeting another version of herself with enormous power that dwarfed her own and yet....

The white dress remained unfamiliar to those who had grown up with Raven in a seldom-seen leotard, and if anything the low cut strapless dress with the high slit revealed more skin than what had preceded it. Garfield and Koriand'r had problems focusing on her words until she removed her right glove, one of the two she'd taken to wearing after that day, the left exposing her pointer and pinky fingers, the right her middle and ring fingers and both exposing her thumb. On her right hand was something Starfire remembered from the aftermath of the most debauched experience she'd ever had with Raven, the turning point in their relationship and where it had become a primary focus of both their lives and tilted her solidly to being Raven's girlfriend with the demonic side's need for multiple partners consoled by time with Dick.Two years of whirlwind pleasure, joining her girlfriend in fighting with the League, and now.....

Raven held up her right arm where a very long feather, the kind that would have been on the wings of a person-sized albatross, covered the area from where the bones of her wrist butted against her hand to her elbow. It seemed like it was a tattoo and yet it was not, instead a cunning element blending Raven's demonic heritage and the same element that had consolidated her control over her demonic power into the chakra-gem. Raven tapped the tattoo with her fingers in a specific rhythm that even Dick Grayson, trained by the Batman, was incapable of focusing on completely and no amount of work by Cyborg would get straight, a simple enough element of mystic coding serving as an extra level of security.

Donna Troy, who had wondered about the feathers, sat up straight merely seeing the tattoo and knowing only one entity known to Themyscira who could have given the inspiration for such a tattoo, and uncertain how such a wonder had come to pass. The tattoo became the feather, long and raven-hued, like a rippling fluid night sky wrought into something akin to the flight feather of a very large bird in shape and yet not.

Donna's eyes were wide and her face pale.

"How?"

Raven looked at her with a cold amusement.

_That is what I am going to tell all of you. These are the feathers that Koriand'r and I have after that day two years ago. You all remember August 2009, don't you?_

They nodded.

_This feather, like the other three, is from the wings of none other than Death herself._

Donna fell out of her chair in shock, the noise an echoing boom in the sudden silence and shock brought by the statement.

It was Gar, of course it was Changeling who would, who spoke up first:

"I thought Death was a big bony guy with a scythe, you know, like Nekron?"

_No, Nekron is the reason the Grim Reaper motif endures. He's not Death, or close to Death. He's an entity that siphons off the energy produced by the passage of souls into the Sunless Land and parasitsizes off of memories of departed loved ones. Death knows of him but he is so far beneath her that she has had no reasons to take action with or for him._

Donna, now seated in her chair with her face still pale said:

"How precisely did you meet Teleute?"

The voice was strained, her jaw set firmly in her mouth, and the team was disoriented at a woman who like her sister was rivaled in power only by the Kryptonians and the New Gods in a truly physical sense being so terrified of what was nothing more than the longest, strangest, most hypnotically beautiful object any of them had ever seen.

_You know the day, Donna. It was two days after you joined the team, after all._

Donna nodded.

"So that was her energy there after all. I knew it."

She clenched her fists, shaking slightly.

_So, to begin, that day in August, something very strange happened. I admit it, I was enjoying the chance for some alone time with Starfire and consoling her from the then-issues she was having with Dick at the time. I did not anticipate that out of everyone and anyone who would encounter me that it would be one of the Seven._

"The who?"

Donna interrupted briefly: "The Seven. Seven concepts given shape and will. They're also known as the Endless. All of them in English, at least, have names that begin with D. Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Delirium."

Gar blinked. "What about dopey?"

Raven flicked him on the ear with a small spark of her energy and he gave her a bit of a dirty look while she continued.

_Right, that's....true. And it was Death, the second of the Seven that stepped in. She......_

Raven looked at the feather.

_She asked me something that makes me wonder how much of that was real or a dream and I would have thought it a very strange dream except for Kori's idea to quite literally pluck Death's wings to show that it was not. Death of the Endless, the most powerful Endless that actually does intervene directly in the lives of mortals, came to me and asked me to have sex with her._

The team all started, bemused.

Raven laughed, a cold and somewhat sad laugh.

_My exact reaction. I still do not understand what precisely led her to do that. There are many beings that could do anything I did to her and have done it better with less of a potentially painful element. But.......that is exactly what happened._

Donna interrupted once more: "Pardon me, Raven, Starfire. In Themyscira we know more than most of the Endless, because our island was once host to all of them, even Destruction in the days before he left. Dream of the Endless had an affair with the muse Calliope, and a son, Orpheus, who was wed on our island and who came to Hades there. As the son of Morpheus, the third of the Seven, he was never fully human nor truly a man, so he was the only man who set foot on Themyscira, seemingly. They don't really understand what they're dealing with if it comes to the Endless, so if I can give them a bit of context for everything else you're going to say?"

Raven nodded, curious and not the least bit offended, finding herself fascinated to hear the true details outside of one of the volumes of the Necronomicon that had names and titles for the various Endless.

"The Endless are not gods, they are greater and more powerful than any god or goddess. At one level, the Endless are not merely reality itself, they are beyond that, beyond any individual given universe. They, more precisely, are both the concepts that they describe and the very elements that sustain all that is or will ever be. Destiny of the Endless is free will and predestination. Death is life and death. Dream is dreams in all their manifold ways. Nightmares, fever dreams, the most beautiful elements of story and song. And he is reality. Destruction is creation and change. Desire is wishes and their fulfillment. Despair is well, despair and hope. Delirium was once Delight and still is from time to time and she, though the youngest of the Endless, is noted to have encountered the greatest servant of the entity known as the Morningstar and at that one moment remade her for all time.

To repeat that, the least and youngest of the Endless is powerful enough to make either the fourth or fifth most powerful being in creation, depending on the reckoning, into a demon with a face burned and rotting on one half, forever doomed to love he who could never love her, and aware that her entire presence and entity relies on the whims of an Endless who could change her and reality again and none would ever know.

Themyscira, as I noted at the beginning of all this, remains the only place outside the halls of Destiny to have seen all seven Endless together for a conclave. The event was the wedding of the Amazon Eurydice to Orpheus, the half-Endless son of Dream, and as the most concentrated entity of dream-stuff more of a story with a voice than anything that has ever existed or will ever do. His music commanded the power of his father, it permitted him ready access to anything and everything he wanted at any time he wanted it. This.....does not always work out for the people who attain it. Orpheus became spoiled and snooty and alienated his father, Morpheus. The wedding to Eurydice, then the temporary consort of my mother, newly bequeathed with the island, was a wondrous circumstance.

Each of the seven arrived, tall and blind and hooded Potmos. Blue-dress clad Teleute with skin of the hue of bone and hair like flowing darkness. Tall and gangly Oneiros, the god Morpheus, with a body skinnier than Scarecrow's and eyes that were fluid night skies that to gaze in them was to be as the beast that looked upon beauty and be as one dead. Massive heavily built Olethros, who makes Kalibak the Cruel look like a ninety-eight pound weakling with a beard that a Russian Tsar would have envied, clad in a thick suit of armor. And for all that he is Destruction he is the kindest of that family after Death, and the only one truly capable of being a person around Mortals. Golden-eyed Epithumia, who is pure androgyny and has no true shape from instant to instant save whatever the beholder deems truly theirs, and xir two shadowed-form striding the world in cruel amusement. Apoinia the anti-Kotei, a being of generous proportions and a love of calling out her own iridescent blood in honor of sorrow and as the root of hope. And Mania, no longer a child and with all the cruelties of what lurked within her.

All of them came and were guests for the ceremony, and in the last time that Morpheus and Orpheus were on civil terms they spoke together and were reconciled, briefly.

It was the old days in Themyscira, before the Old Gods were replaced by new religions and new ways in the eyes of most, deeming the emergence of the entities of Apokolips and New Genesis worth building a citadel on Earth, for most of the pantheon of the Hellenes, and under the vastness of the oceans for Poseidon. Atlantis and Themyscira are not truly the old Hellenic ways, they are realms where Gods and Mortals meet. This was already evolving then, and it meant that Themyscira was a place of dangers. A disease conjured by a gust of wind from Tartarus and an incautious trip of Eurydice brought her to the realm of Elysium, and Orpheus could not accept the loss.

First he went to his father, who pleaded with him to accept loss, and to remain with the family he had. Orpheus did not listen and in the last words of Morpheus to his son, Dream of the Endless said that he had no son. So from Morpheus he went to Olethros, who counseled him against it likewise but directed him to his older sister, Teleute. The entity that Raven and Starfire somehow......I still can't believe you actually physically had sex with Death of the Endless. I'm sorry. I would almost be envious except this story shows why sexual involvement with them is...unwise...for anyone. Teleute told Orpheus that she did not physically rule the souls of the Dead.

Our knowledge on the Seven stems from the questions my mother asked the severed head of Orpheus before it underwent its journeys in Man's world. He has told us much and we are not certain of what to make of all of it. What he has said concerning Teleute, the entity that-I'm sorry again, I realize this is going to sound a bit weird, maybe creepy, but you really fucked Death? What are you supposed to be, Thanos?-and her sphere, the Sunless Lands, is that of all the Endless she eschews the more dramatic realm. Hers is a small place, the size of a Moscow apartment in our terms at one level. Yet it his belief that her role in the Sunless Lands is not that of a cosmic Russian Tsar to bind and loose with whims and to rule for the sake of ruling, but to sustain balance in the afterlife as she does with life.

Her role, and her function, is not governing the land of the dead, but ensuring the psychic balance that holds it all together stays there. Of all the Seven she is said, again by Orpheus to my mother, to be the one who shall outlive the very Presence, the last being in our corner of Existence, and what happens then none know. She may put the chairs on the table and lock the universe behind her and leave. She may become the next Presence, meaning that God is and has always been a woman. It is something far beyond our knowledge and we never liked trying to guess the outcomes. Of all the Seven she has no rules that bind her, so if she decides to become involved in.....everything...that this feather means again, there is nothing we can do to stop her. Or slow her down. 

She counseled him against the course he took, but told him to see what he would see from Hades, and so Orpheus went past the gates in Themyscira itself, stepping to cross the River Styx, and used the voice inherited from the Lord Shaper to make Hades and Persephone, the King and Queen of Hades, release Eurydice on the condition that he not look back and continue to sing until he ascended. So he ascended and right at the edge of the gate at Themyscira's boundary between the spheres he did look and she returned to Elysium. In his grief he found himself transported by unaware access to his father's gifts to the countryside near Athens where the maddened worshipers of Bacchus tore and rended him, leaving his severed head to go to the Amazons, where he has given us much of our most secret lore.

Her nephew has told us much of all the Endless, though I do not think, and certainly hope very strongly that Dream and Delirium and Destiny will not be involved here. Destruction might, Desire is always uncertain, and Death herself? I suspect that with her feathers becoming objects of desire it will be like a strange incident in New Orleans. John, Zatanna, and Raven investigated that."

_Yes we did. I know the incident you mean. A girl named Annabel Lee Plath (no, I am not making up that name) took the ankh of Death herself and sought to kill and replace Death and to become the successor of her. She called to this world the direct presence and power of an Endless who played nice with Plath out of sympathy for her goals. When Plath slew the emissary of the Endless, she simply resurrected him and in an hour and a half destroyed the attempt to usurp her position and to replace her and unleashed a superlative power that has left New Orleans a fertile place for very powerful death magic. And yet when the Blackest Night came, no Black Lanterns could go around New Orleans any more than they could here. The power of the true Death is anathema to them._

_It was the awareness of that kind of power, to go back to the original incident Star and I went through, that led to my very shock when Death appeared in my room and decided she wanted to hook up with me. So I did, and Starfire ultimately joined us._

"Yes, this Death was very, very good at-"

"TMI!" the shouts of the rest of the team save Raven silenced her and Starfire flushed and meekly nodded to accept the point.

_In the process I found myself somehow summoning not merely one part of Death, who is everywhere when everything dies, but the very core entity herself. She was no less eager than the shard but those nails of hers straddle the line between nail and claw, and they tore open my back, gave me a.....necrosis._

The team winced.

_I could have died, I was afraid I would the moment she appeared in my room. Remember, I thought the day my father came to the Earth would be my last. Every breath I took since seemed to be borrowed time and I was in mortal fear of seeing her show up, and of the thought that I wouldn't even get to tell you all a farewell when she did. And then there she was, in my room, demanding from me a favor that seemed so unlike her._

_Her sibling Desire I would have expected it and since refusing an Endless is like telling a star not to shine, I would have gone along with it and tried to forget. Her brother Dream, yes. Even Delirium, or Destruction. Death? As much as anyone knew for lack of any truthful knowledge in sorcery and lore, Death was above the concerns of the flesh. Perhaps she was, perhaps she simply never really saw anything to it until after the experiences with Orpheus, and anyone she could trust as an outlet that would not see her caught up in the politics of various pantheons of different types._

_I took her ankh, which would have killed an ordinary mortal, and did so as Pride, daughter of Trigon, the fourth and youngest of his children._

At this the entire team all started, even Koriand'r, and their hair stood on end (save Cyborg, whose eye turned white with fear).

_I used the ankh to heal myself, and reminded her that she had welcomed herself into my realm and the laws of hospitality. The other six Endless would all be bound by these, even Destiny, the most truly powerful. Death told me that she was not like her brothers and sisters and Desire and quite literally shoved me with a reminder of just how strong the Endless are. They're not like Darkseid or Highfather, or Orion, or Diana and Donna. They're not interested in such contests, though if they were there would not really be a contest with anything save the Presence, the Morningstar, or Demurgios. Perhaps Mazikeen if she's got their true name and a sufficiently quick set of reflexes to finish speaking it._

_Even the other angels and all the lords of the various planes and circles of Hell would fall before them._

_Yet she conceded the point that clawing my back and her power injecting my flesh with the literal rot of the grave was an act of folly. For her repentance I used her again to punish her....and took four of her flight feathers, crippling her ability to use her wings and I believe, perhaps crippling her metaphysically as well. Like a bird's flight feathers, hers were connected deeply to her being, to what isn't really a nervous system the way a mortal has, but very loosely akin to it. Death's wings in turn are the elements that take people to the grave, they command enormous power. In various mystical theory, if an Endless could be bound, given that they do not truly have bodies, their blood and metaphysical essence could grant awe-inspiring power to anything that wielded it._

_The Sleeping Sickness of the first half of the 20th Century was connected to a very dangerous sorcerer named Roderick Burgess, who died before the age of supervillainy started in the World Wars, and for which existence itself is fortunate. He would have been more dangerous than John Dee or Doctor Faust. Far more dangerous. He captured Dream of the Endless and stole from him his clothing, finding that this granted him enormous power in the lands of dreaming but little in the land of waking....and in turn parlayed this into other elements of knowledge. He had sought to bind Death, most speculate for immortality. I suspect he would have tried to use her true name and to experiment with an Endless who offers much more direct power in the waking world._

_In crippling the wings of Death and clipping her, essentially, I am not sure what effect that's had in two years. There hasn't truly been enough to say._

"It does seem like fewer people have died. Pandemics and epidemics and fatal diseases have basically ended, death only takes the very young, the very sick, and the very old. No supervillains have killed anyone in two years, even the Joker Or Zsaz. Even those guys can't actually torture people physically, which means that some of Batman's Rogues haven't left Arkham in two years. Boo fucking hoo, heh. Nobody has been able to explain that," mused Nightwing. "Now we have that explanation."

_Yes, I'm afraid you do. Afterlives have metaphysical tolls to pay too and they are....not doing exceptionally well. The most keenly adept of mystics refer to 'dawn in the Sunless lands', which is not a good phrase, and there has been an extraordinary increase in the rise of ghosts._

With that Raven pointed to the TV where two groups of individuals clad in a rough equivalent of janitorial uniforms, one all men, one all women. successfully contained an outbreak of ghosts risen from the grave.

_Essentially I think I created the Ghostbuster business and made into what it is. Death itself hasn't stopped, not here, not worldwide. But Death is weaker, and as she is Life as well as Death....._

"Do you think that's why there's been no babies born anywhere in the universe that we know of for two years?"

Raven shrugged.

_I don't know. I don't know what that means. That might be clipping Death's wings. It might be some new supervillain waiting to reveal themselves with a scheme that will see them collectively wiped off the map. It might be a harbinger of a new wave of mass extinctions. It might be yet another botched thing of the so-called Guardians of the Universe on Oa to restrain mortal species from too much reproduction. But if I had to wager my guess, I would say that yes, clipping the wings of Death also clipped the wings of Life. What does that mean for Life?_

She shrugged again.

_I'm not omniscient, that burden is the Presence's and Destiny of the Endless. I don't want it, wouldn't know what to do with it if I had it. I do not know how to fix it, either. Nothing I've read about how wings work physically and metaphysically on winged entities says there's a way to fix it, if I were to offer her three of the feathers back, they could not work. The fourth is the one in my room with the glyphs from her own blood._

The team winced.

_I know you all remember the few years after the Brotherhood, yes?_

The team winced again. The bad years, three years of the Titans seeing an alarmingly high number of deaths, some in the year when Black Adam declared war on the world, others in the Technis Imperative that saw Vic infected with a Mother Box from Apokolips. And another when the vengeful souls of Azarath had risen from the dead in the form of a monstrous armored giant that was the glamour for a lion-like soul-self. The Lost Twenty had statues in their honor, with Tara Markov's in a quiet place as Tara, ironically, was entirely fine and content to live a normal life, though she had moved back to the Tower when the vengeful souls of fallen Azarath had become the first major focus of enmity since the Brotherhood.

The living Azarath had helped to destroy the fallen one, and Arella, even, returned to Earth and set up a ranch for other women and girls who'd been in the position she was in. Yet twenty Titans had died. Conner had been one of them, so was the other Wonder Girl, Cassandra Sandsmark, who was in her off year time with the Titans. Of the Twenty, all but two had fully returned to life, and among the Lost Twenty was a statue of Raven herself in memorial of what she had seen as her own last day.

_Well, I used her blood to mark sigils on the feather and make her swear to obey them. One turns her essentially into a very powerful Djinn. I hold the feather, I summon her and she is obliged to obey me, or to obey Starfire. The other on the other side, the one that faces me, is the smaller-scale calligraphy that spells out her true name with each of the first syllables and mandates that she obey the one who wields the feather in all things....which in my turn I used to keep the curse that dogged our team and my....my family...from the revolving door of despair and what it means when death is not, in the end, permanent or truly the end._

_We all know those feelings, don't we?_

The team nodded at each other, facial expressions betraying the warring emotions.

_Yes, I thought so. Death for most people truly is the end, and they see us 'dying' and not coming back to life. That could and does encourage all kinds of self-destructive idiocy and a responsible group of people who could stop this before it starts and save more lives would. Superheroes, bar one encounter with her by Captain Atom, have never encountered her and neither do our immediate families. Yet as she is said to have done with Hob Gadling, whom older mages once mistook for the Wandering Jew, she can remove the power to die, and ultimately anything that would cause death, directly or indirectly, from individuals she favors. I made her favor all of us, because I refuse to put us through the uselessness of a hollow pseudo-death. I did not dare ask for more, because past a point is a swift road to 'the rest of the Endless decide we are now a threat to all of them' and we could become as though we had never been, or worse a poorly animated cartoon show appealing simultaneously to children and hipsters and relying on fart jokes and nostalgia as a substitute for humor._

Everyone simultaneously shuddered.

_Yeah......_

She continued to hold up the feather, as they looked at the sharp edge that would have otherwise been a quill.

_Four of these, I have two, and Kori has two. This is why, Wally and Gar, you took a bath after trying to touch them. I can command her by the one. You would gain access to enormous power in magical terms and have no control over it. Imagine each of these as an anti-life equation level source of power in its own right that even the lowliest chimpanzee or gorilla could use to become the next Grodd or Dr. Zaius._

Everyone else shuddered again.

"Yeah, that Zaius was an asshole," growled Wally. "Even Grodd thought he was."

_There are only four things that could draw Lucifer himself to Jump City. And you are looking at one of them._

With a calm blink she pressed the feather to her arm and spoke a single word of power and with that and a brief flash of unlight, the feather was on the back of her right arm and her gloves concealed it beneath powerful wards.

"OK, so the Devil is here to try to steal the feathers of Death?"

_Lucifer is only inferior to the Presence in terms of knowledge and power. He knows he needs the one with glyphs to do what he needs done. Which....means he's not quite here for the feathers._

She winced.

_He may not fully realize it yet but he would if he saw that feather. He would need not my feather plucked from the wings of the Second of the Seven, but me to control the feather as I enchanted the power there to respond to no power but my own._

"If he's all that powerful," Victor said in musing terms "couldn't he just override your magic and replace it with his own?"

_He could try, yes. But if he does that, he leaves himself exposed to the collective will of all the other most powerful entities. Including the Presence, who above all others would not want Lucifer to control the entity fated to outlive them both for an understanding of what precisely Lucifer could do with such an entity at his beck and call._

Vic whistled. "Damn Rae, you don't think small."

Raven's nose twitched. _I admit that it was not the best approach in hindsight, and that this is, in technical terms, the biggest FUBAR in superhero history since the Joker conned that fifth dimensional imp into giving him absolute power._

Nightwing started. "Say what?"

 _Oh right,_ Raven twitched again. _Most people remember that as a dream. She shuddered. I do not ever want to wear the poodle outfit again._

Everyone else, even Starfire, looked curiously at herself and at each other, before shrugging. They did all have that strange dream from a year and a half ago, but that was all it was. A dream.

_As I said, it's the second-biggest FUBAR in superhero history but what's done is done._

"Wait, you said something about brothers," said Gar, who was genuinely curious at that.

"You're the Gem, I thought you were Trigon's only kid."

_No, I have three brothers and a nephew. My first brother is Ruskoff, who has declared himself ruler of the Malebolge. As far as I'm concerned he's welcome to it, I do not want to be ruler of a plane of Hell. Way too much work and it ropes me into a seamy underbelly that makes all of our lives more complicated. Ruskoff's a gigantic lout that's about half the size my unlamented father used to be. He has horns of smoke and six eyes, like all of them except father and I do. Comes of them all having Lilith for a mother, I suppose. Skuge is the thinnest of them, even thinner than Dream but he is the most physically powerful of the circle. Only Kalibak is his physical superior in entities in this plane, but unfortunately for existence where Kalibak the Cruel is dumber than a box of hammers, Skuge is the smartest of the three._

_The last of my brothers is the one most familiar to the superhero community. Belial son of Trigon, father of the demon Etrigan._

Nightwing and Donna started.

" _The_ Etrigan?"

_Yes, Etrigan is my nephew. We.....don't exactly have the most productive familial relationship. Not the punch you in the face kind of unproductive, he assumes I need or wish mentorship in the demonic side of my existence. Which....no thank you, I am perfectly fine without that. Etrigan being the first hero in the family means dear Belial failed to get the leadership of the plane, which even with the heroic element of my own career as the only one to actually destroy Trigon would be mine if I did want it. I suspect my brothers are here to try to either make me take that rule of that plane, or to make me give it to Ruskoff. They are here, I hope, purely for that reason. I might be wrong. We don't really communicate very much._

An awkward laugh echoed in the team.

_We all know my magic makes me a semi-regular in the Justice League as well as here, and that even Doctor Fate respects me as an equal. Each of my brothers is a full-blooded demon and my superior in raw power, though what restrains demons works inconsistently on me and perfectly on them. Everything has its drawbacks, as she smiled with a slight element of coldness to her smile. Aren't we all so lucky that the Devil and the Sons of Trigon picked the same week to visit us?_

More awkward laugh.

"So now what?" As she turned to Donna, she gave her a look that was more than slightly uncertain, biting her lip.

_I don't know. It's up to them._

THE FORMER CHURCH OF BLOOD, 1980 PEREZ BOULEVARD, GOTHAM CITY:

The Sons of Trigon looked at the place with cold contempt. It was derelict, though as with the sphere out of time where she had actually been conceived, the ghost of their father's presence was strong here.

Somehow those wretched mortals in that insipid cult summoned a shard of him. It was Skuge who snarled this, clenching his gangly oversized hands.

 **It was no accident, brother. It was the whim of fate,** mused Belial. **I can feel my son's presence here, he's made sure that no true trace of our late father remained. He is not on-world at present, I believe he must be off with the foul individuals that proclaim themselves heroes instead of something more fitting like gods or overlords.**

Ruskoff made a cold snort, almost porcine in its nature.

**My ass, brother. Those things would be struck down by gods for the hubris if they tried and they know it.**

As they turned, his eyes caught a presence that had snuck in quietly, using the mayhem stirred by an outburst of fire from a set of Kalashkinovs and an ambush of the Batman and Black Bat set up by Black Mask to slip in, finding the phrasing appropriate in a way that made her roll her eyes at her own supposed wit.

The three sons of Trigon turned in a single perfect motion to gaze at a woman in a crimson-red habit with a golden Mark of Skath broach adorning the cape around it, a twisted mirror of the cult of Azar.

"Hail, great lords, sons of the Malebolge. You, O Lords of the Eighth Circle, return to us in our hour of need."

**And what are you supposed to be, little human?**

She rose to her knees, ever-young and the perfect bride of her dearly disenchanted spouse.

"I am Mother Mayhem, wife to Brother Blood, once your arch-priest, now frozen in an endless icy wait."

 **Father scared him away, did he?** cackled Belial.

"He lacked faith," Mother Mayhem responded, calmly.

The Sons of Trigon snorted.

"I want my husband awakened.....and we shall place that which is left to us in our ritual center of Zandia at your disposal, Sons of the Eighth Devil."

 **Very well,** said Ruskoff. **I see where he is in your mind. How came you to not be frozen while he was?**

"He signed up with a band of fools calling themselves the Brotherhood of Evil."

**Mm. Very well then.**

THE HALL OF ICE, FORMER CITADEL OF THE BROTHERHOOD:

Some of the supervillains imprisoned in the hall of ice had found their way out. Brother Blood was among the number that hadn't, along with the equally frozen Brain and Mallah, Madame Rouge, General Immortus, and others of the Jump City underground left to be frozen in endless existence in stasis so that their counterparts could readily exploit their absence. No honor among thieves.

Three portals of burning crimson lit fires in the heat, a woman stumbling to the ground clad in crimson before the frozen cyborgified body of her husband, who still wore the mantle given to him by the demon himself. Their god was fallen but his daughter lived and commanded his power and his role, and if the Sons wished to delineate politics in the sphere, having mortal allies certainly couldn't hurt them, Mother Mayhem reasoned. She was startled to see Skuge, known to be a brawler who thought with his fists, stepping forward to place his hand on the iced up body of Brother Blood. Crimson light burned out and Sebastian Blood suddenly found himself staring into a gangly thin visage that was horribly akin to what his ritual of so long ago in Gotham had summoned.

**Hello, Arch-Priest. Ready to resume your vocation?**

LUX, SLOTT BOULEVARD, JUMP CITY:

Lucifer the Morningstar was polishing his bar and smirking at the amount reaped from those who came to it. Mortals blamed him for deals aimed at stealing souls but that was a conceit of stories which relied on conflating him with the lesser arch-demon Neron, the entity that pretended to rule hell in his absence. Duma and Remiel had greater tasks than to sort out all the minor demon princelings that declared themselves pretenders, and he knew that, too. Jump City might have a daughter of Trigon who'd found the impossible but it also had plenty of people to slake more conventional vices.

Mazikeen looked at him, the glamour that was set on her set on her at a very powerful level, enabling her to reconstruct her original beautiful voice, and a taunting reminder of the curse that Delirium of the Endless had invoked on her in his presence.

_**Why the delay in confronting these supposed Titans?** _

"There are other factors that have made their presence known since my arrival, Maz dear. They are no threat, to be sure, but this is not some matter of donning spandex and going to simply confront them in a fight. The daughter of Trigon has enough wards she will know of my bar and of my leaving it, and that I am waiting for her to move far enough from that wretched piece of architecture that I can simply slip in and take the feather and be done with it."

**_What good does the feather do? It is not her true name. To try to control this one without that is an exercise in futility, my love. Nothing can do that._ **

"With what's written on that feather it doesn't need to be."

Lucifer smiled.

"I'm above the kind of pettiness the likes of Maru-Sariel, Sachiel, Sandalphon, and due to coercion, even my brother Michael, have done. I do not seek to slake lusts in so convenient a fashion as all that. I won't treat her the way the daughter of the eighth circle's former lord did."

_**So....what precisely DO you intend?** _

"She humiliated me in the realm between my worlds. I will make her kneel before me and hear from her lips that my fate is mine to determine and that if I want her to amuse me by performing errands for me as a new ruler of my universe, and in this one, she shall."

_**Why?** _

"Because it's funny. Reducing the sister of the one I sought to destroy to a glorified errand girl without any further ambitions will humble the Endless and gall her. It may be my fate at the very end of time to be taken by her, but she shall show me a healthy respect and not be such an insolent wretch from this point forward. Such a gamble with so powerful an entity of the Endless is not to be undertaken lightly. I suspect the demon's daughter if she did enchant things did so so only she could control them."

He frowned.

"I cannot as yet see a way around that without drawing in my brother, and perhaps Elaine. I would rather not lose out in this, or grant her family another victory at my expense."

_**So....boredom, then?** _

"Essentially, yes. When I no longer rule Hell I can pursue games, after all. To suborn Death to my side will grant me a boon that will make my own universe superior to the one Ellaine rules, and ensure that the Endless leave me in peace, as has been my will since I left that kingdom. And.....she is, I believe, the only one who can lift your curse."

_**You would do that for me, my love?** _

"Yes. You have been more loyal to me than most, Maz. It is only fair you get something from it."

Mazikeen smiled with the trace of her old face, and both remained at work in the bar, planning.

In truth Lucifer could have simply thrown caution to the wind, stormed the tower, wiped the floor with the team of 'heroes' and simply taken the feather by force but he was not Maru-Sariel, now the repentant angel Zauriel. He would not simply march in majesty to do as he pleased with mortals and risk bringing in the Spectre and the Presence directly. It was a risky gamble for sheer amusement, a lord of Existence playing a different kind of game for the novelty factor and no higher reason behind it.

The only wild card that worried him was that the goals he was setting of seeking the feather would draw in the crippled Endless, whose suffering and weakness was causing reality no small amount of unease at various points, or that simply finally making a bid for what he had realized the moment it was taken would make the unease and spots of distortion in reality potentially as bad as it had been in the imprisonment of Dream but worse, given Death's greater power and role. Among other reasons, this meant his goals were going to limit themselves to pettiness and scoring a new ally among the greatest entities in creation, because anything greater that the old him would have deemed more suitable would be to make a larger scale of Burgess's mistake.

And he had come too far since his father had abandoned his job and left it in the hands of Elaine Belloc, too far since he had become a creator of his own universe with his own goals to play in this one in the name of the other, to risk all of the greater elements of who he was in another bid too far.

Lucifer smiled. An interesting game indeed whether he won or lost. Not so idly he wondered when and how John Constantine would find his way into all of this, because this was just the kind of circumstances where Constantine would make his appearance and seek to cross his Milvian Bridge to his own advantage and to Hell with everyone else. A figure after his own heart.

He still expected to win, however. Against the second most powerful entity in creation and in a wholly different sense to that of the Endless, what use were long underwear and powers? What worked against the like of Darkseid or Trigon was useless to him. In itself, humbling the invincible superheroes that always found ways to win would be its own, and belated, petty vengeance against the Lord Shaper by seeking to give the kind of stories he wove to amuse himself on the Earth a case of Lucifer hijacking the narrative. That thought gave Lucifer a bit more animation as he discussed the prospects of how to weaponize both what the Sons of Trigon were likely to do and how they were likely to do it, and what it would be to be worthy of the true king who should have overthrown his father initially of all Existence, but not so much that it would draw in the children of the Silver City and a greater mess.

"Well played, Pride," he murmured as he looked at the multiple interlocking elements of her wards and how the Tower simultaneously anchored them all together and yet trying to use that to remove the rest would activate multiple powerful tripwires that would summon the attention of the Presence if nothing else did. A Gordian Knot done in caution by a repentant demon expecting to die and in much greater power and strength by a confident one blessed with life. A competent player on the small scale would make his satisfying his old warnings to Dream and Death that much more satisfying for the success when her deep works were overturned against her. He couldn't resist a sharp laugh when he realized that at one way of looking at them the wards spelled out the phrase 'Undying Flame' in Azarathi, the most powerful ritual name of the spirit the thrice-born priestess worshiped. The demon might have left the temple that sought to make her the fourth, but she had never truly left it. He might even give her a free bourbon from his bar for the delight in finding a small-scale demon lord that reminded him so much of himself! 

THE APARTMENT OF DEATH OF THE ENDLESS:

On her couch, Death gingerly caressed the numbed, mutilated wing. She had underestimated what it meant that half of her flight feathers on the one wing were gone. She was slower now, her realm was uncertain, as was she. All for the sake of a time of satiating curiosity that had gone so horribly wrong and right at the same time. Her former partner had found a way to bind her more powerful than the perverted shaman that had tried to bind her into an unwilling marriage, even if she had a very few times rested touching herself thinking of Raven, which with the changes in her job and her realm was not often.

Desire had given her the anesthetic those mortal years ago, a partial eyeblink for an Endless. It did not need much in the way of reapplying even when her morbid fascination with the sight of what she had never imagined possible meant she would spend her free time that was not resting or feeding her fish rubbing the deadened wound, feeling the.....everything with it. Usually her wings were veiled even from her siblings' sight, but since then she'd simply kept them visible. A brilliant light glowed from her gallery and she got herself off the couch, checking with satisfaction that Slim and Wandsworth were fed, affectionately patting Cavendish, who was so tightly squeezed he'd become worn (and repaired with thread in a gesture that confused her siblings but gave her satisfaction of being more than the beginning and the end that was hard to describe) whenever she fed the fish and watched them eat.

She walked carefully, her clipped wing folded with her unclipped. Even deadened the loss of her sense of balance meant her umbrella now served as an equivalent of a cane, a gesture of weakness that had deeply disturbed Dream and Desire, though Destiny remained impassive (as always) the one time she'd asked him why that had happened and if he could help her to regrow the feathers and overcome everything with it. He'd said nothing, and it was the last time, and that a mortal year and a half ago, that she, usually the emotional center of the family along with the Prodigal before he'd left and now just her, had seen any of her siblings.

She heard Destiny's voice from the gallery, and bit her lip. A conclave. The last one had seen Dream brought to suicide. Part of her said not to, not to go in, not to have her siblings see what the impulsive decision to overcome the endless vingtillions of years of sorrowful loneliness at a true sense had led her to do. Not to let them see her, usually so happy and willing to be the mediator for the dysfunctional collection of personifications, crippled. The rest of her that understood that sitting here feeling sorry for herself was a regression to the old days when she had left, when the sorrow suppressed first under the hard face with the fragile glass inside that shattered when a mortal asked her a question and then the affable face.

Oh she could do that in her job well enough, Mortals saw her walking with her umbrella like a cane and didn't really see her any less perky than she'd usually been. A job was a job. Even those entities outside the Endless saw a carefully constructed facade where she was much the way they saw in public, the version of her that because Dream believed was the real her was that much stronger for his belief. Even Daniel Hall, or he who had once been Daniel Hall, saw her thus at one level. But the rest of the family?

She stepped through the gallery, face drawn with the shame of the clipped wing, umbrella accompanying her shoes to the table.

_It is well that you are here with us, sister. The conclave begins._

She bit back a sigh. Hopefully none of the family would die this time.


	4. Conclave and Broomsticks:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Endless convene for the first time since the emergence of the new Dream of the Endless in the wake of the death of Morpheus. Schemes begin to roll forward, and new players enter the scene.

THE HALLS OF DESTINY:

Each of the Endless bar one was present at the conclave. The seat of the Prodigal remained barren and empty of his presence, which in the past had been so soothing and as the most recent conclave had shown was sorely missed. Dream was different, the rail-thin and dour, brooding Morpheus was replaced by the equally tall but bulkier and denser albino presence of Daniel, the starlight-eyes replaced by pools of infinite darkness. The other Endless, bar one, remained much as they had before. Stout Despair with the porcine snout and her hooks, Delirium, today with a ponytail of rainbow-hue, a mesh shirt, short skirt, and shorts underneath it. Desire clad in a red tuxedo, xir face as always ever-changing and the only true constant the glowing yellow sunfire eyes. Destiny, taller than Dream and than any save the vanished Prodigal but much more slender than the Prodigal.

And there was Death.

She seemed wilted by comparison to what she was before, ashamed of her wing, and was distinctly silent.

Destiny, the last time, had spoken because of a visit from the Fates. This time the opening was distinct:

_I have summoned this conclave because of recent events that have affected one of us, and because of a new challenge that has arisen._

The other Endless looked at Death, who simply placed her head in her hands and then slumped with her head hidden behind one arm and another on top of it, refusing to meet their gaze.

_In a short span for the Endless and two mortal years prior, our sister sought the resolution of an emotional wound she did not reveal how dearly she suffered from to any of us. From that, as we all see, she has been weakened, even crippled. Four of the flight feathers from her right wing were taken from her, and remain as trophies in the collection of one of the teams of so-called heroes in one world within the set of fifty-two universes and assorted hypertime clusters._

Delirium spoke in a warbling voice:

_DoEsN't sOuNd VeRy hErOiC._

_Our sister attacked the person she sought to heal her wound with by accident and came close to killing her, the person used her sigil to heal herself and clipped her wing in retaliation for the attack and violation of hospitality, however accidental._

Desire looked at Death.

_You have never been bound by our rules, why did you allow that to happen?_

Death said muffled behind her arm:

_**She was a demon and reacted with her instincts. She did nothing wrong.** _

Desire scoffed.

_Neither did you. You got a little too into passion and someone got physically hurt. Accidents will happen._

Dream's thunderclap echoed against Desire's sultry whispers:

**To give to the law of hospitality, even by choice, accords penalties for even an accidental violation. We all know that. All the same, the demon clipped our sister's wing and we have all seen her realm trembles and frays, which affects all of ours.**

The other siblings nodded, save Death, who seemed to try to shrink further behind her arms.

Desire reached over and prodded her on the shoulder roughly.

_Oh come off it. You have the anesthetic. You will regrow the feathers. So you lost your virginity and sex proved a little more unpleasant and emotionally and physically complicated than you expected. We are all of us mighty in our own ways but we are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. You did not fall from some pedestal to become a harlot, and if your heart was broken, we have all been there, even our brother who summoned us. His broke when our brother Morpheus died, after all. We have all been through this. You told Dream long ago to not try to be alone. Why do you keep fighting this?_

Death's eye glared at Desire through the fingers of her left hand, which had slipped to cover her eyes. Raising herself up, she glared at Desire.

**_Yes, we have all been through this, Desire, in our own ways. I have spent a very long time being the strong, kind, affable core of the family, my entire existence up to that moment. I told myself I would never yield to what I did there, and then when I did, that it would just be a thing that would not leave effects._ **

She raised her clipped wing, which extended to its full length and size.

_**I yielded to weakness and to desperation to escape loneliness, and look at this. I thought I could just......indulge something once, and that would be all there was.** _

Desire laughed coldly, where Dream sighed.

Both spoke at once, and looked at each other in surprise as they spoke the same words:

_It is easier to loose what is buried than to control it, sister._

Desire was the one that continued and overcame the momentary shock and tendency to stare at xir sibling first.

_You did nothing wrong. You are a person, too, as are all of us. You had a moment of weakness, and you let yourself yield to it. We have all done that, my sister. I did not fully anticipate nor intend that my daughter and granddaughter would become so much a part of our family the way they have but they have. Morpheus did not intend for the experiences with Orpheus to underscore why the rule on loving mortals was there. Yet.....you did not love the demoness, did you?_

Death shook her head. ** _No. I wanted.......to know. I wanted to know what pleasure was like. And I violated the laws of hospitality and cannot allow that anesthetic you gave me to fade or the pain will....._**

She bit her lip. I remember what I was like before the hard and brittle phase. None of us would benefit from pain sending me back to those days. Times have changed. Reality has as well.

_And that is why we have been called to conclave._

Destiny's voice retained a perfect monotone, yet was always a hypnotic thing that could be heard and welcomed and yet was an inexorable force of overwhelming power.

The feathers clipped from our sister's wing in that one universe have drawn the attention of one of the few beings in creation besides she who clipped them who could make full use of them.

Who?

It was not Death who asked, though she was just narrowly beaten to doing so. It was Despair, who had played with her lip with her hook for a time and remained near-invisible as was her wont.

_The Morningstar. He seeks vengeance in his usual wont for petty slights. Against Dream for the event that made him give up his kingdom, a thing he has forgiven no more than he has the first Presence for defeating him in war. And against our sister for reminding him that mighty as he is, we are of a different kind to him and it is not possible to truly remove or to halt our existence in anything that is or will ever be. To such an entity as the Morningstar, these are intolerable slights against his person._

_And the vengeance he seeks?_ The peal of thunder was low and menacing and for a moment the white-within-white Dream seemed the very impression of dark-clad Morpheus.

_A pettiness, as I have said. He seeks to take the one feather that she who clipped our sister took for her own and marked with glyphs of command to make our sister into his errand-girl, which even with the Second Presence would give the Morningstar power to control she who will be the last of all things. Nothing in creation will allow him, of all entities, to have that power._

_That could be the end of that Earth if it goes far enough._ Desire's voice was as always a smoky and whispy thing neither truly masculine nor feminine but a perfection in between impossible to truly capture.

 _It could, yes._ Destiny's monotone could be maddening sometimes. And sometimes, as here, surprisingly dry with a hint of inflection where more demonstrative people would have bellowed sarcasm.

 _What is a planet to one of the Endless?_ Desire's feet were now on the table, the front legs of the chair leaning off the ground, as xie looked up at the ceiling.

_A planet in one universe? Nothing. Our sister caught up in the eldest son's vengeance against the absent father, and made a pawn for ends that will ultimately become dangerous to even my own sphere? Everything._

Desire's feet were on the ground now, and the other Endless were all cautiously looking at each other.

_The threat is that grave?_

_It is._

_Then what are we to do about it? We are not like the demoness that clipped her wing. We will not don spandex and go forth to wage war on the Firstborn of the Presence's spawn._

_I did not say that we would._

_Oh?_

_Our sister's desperation to end her loneliness crippled her. Yet none of us can truly help her, for her power, and what is within that feather, is beyond those of you who are younger. It is my burden that I may intervene only when my book says. There are but five times in all creation that my book grants me the power to directly intervene and to act and to showcase what it is that makes Destiny.......the sphere that is and remains mine. And I, of all of us, the one greatest in power._

_Are we to take it that this could be one of the five? It has been....all of existence, and there has not been one. Why mention it at all?_

_You know the rules, my sibling._

Desire huffed, xir jaw extending outward briefly in a remarkably equine expression.

_Very well, brother. Keep your damned secrets._

_What can be noted is that she must be the one to set in motion her own healing as she did before after the period when she abdicated her function._

_**I.....you mean become hard and brittle again? That didn't work, Destiny.** _

_I do not mean that, sister._

Destiny stepped over, his chained book at his side, his hand on Death's shoulder in a familial gesture that echoed in the sudden shock and silence of the conclave of the Endless.

_What Desire said to you when xie pulled you up in the Nexus is correct. It was not a failure to seek an end to loneliness, the only failure was to let it build for so long that you took a desperate action more expected from a mortal than an Endless. And that too will happen. Our brother Dream has yielded many times to weakness, Delirium has, Desire's family is a result of it with xir, too. You are not alone, sister, even if you insist that a clipped wing means you must act like it to your eyes._

Death's hand took his, and grateful for the contact with one of her family, Death sighed, her eyes closed, umbrella between her legs. The moment passed and then she grabbed it and used it to help herself stand upright, her wings raised up in a vast u-shape.

_**My flight feathers are more than merely symbolic. They help me.......they help me stay a being with will and not just fading into the background of everything in our mother's realm. And they help me in my job. I need my umbrella as......more of a cane than an umbrella because it feels like....** _

_iT fEeLs LiKE yoU'vE lOsT a PaRt oFYoUrsElF aNd iT cAn nEvER cOmE baCk?_

_**Yes.** _

Delirium's voice was briefly that of the old delight:

_Everything changes, sissy. Even you. A few feathers aren't you any more than seventy years in a fishbowl killed Dream._

Death winced.

_**True.** _

Desire's whispers moved like smoke and shadows from a flame in a cave:

_Whenever you go to that Earth, to seek your healing, you will not do so alone. We have all suffered enough for our letting our limitations serve as our personalities and not our strength._

Desire's smile became carnivorous.

_Besides, between the time in the fishbowl and the incident with the AI, and of course your wing being clipped, our family has taken a bit of a dent in prestige. We are not, collectively, going to dignify the Morningstar's strife by playing King of the Mountain, but I think you're due a reunion with the two who mutilated you, for your own good, and perhaps ours as well if nothing else._

Death frowned.

_**Why? Why would i go back to them? I asked them for what they gave me and they gave it to me.** _

_You owe it to yourself, sister. Your mind and your emotions won't heal until you see for yourself that you are more than your wings. You don't want to be Dream when he was willing to die and let the Kindly Ones lay low the dreaming, do you?_

She shook her head.

Desire's smile became roguish and xir jaw much more masculine.

_And you still think of the demoness, don't you?_

**_Yes._ **The edge of brokeness in Death's voice led Destiny's hand on her shoulder to tighten and then seem to stroke it as Death sighed, head down, ashamed anew. 

Desire shrugged. _As such entities go she is certainly as lovely as the Oan or Nada. I am impressed. I thought all of the brood of that four-eyed bastard were as poorly chosen in aesthetics as he. You have good taste, sister._

Death blanched. **_You yelled at me for her mutilating me._ **

Desire sighed. _Yes. Because as you told Dream that day, it happened because you wanted it to. You felt you made a mistake, that you deserved to suffer, and so you let yourself be wounded as penance. And not just for having sex in a way that leaves me awed, frankly, and envious of your versatility. Four feathers._

Desire raised a closed fist, raising xir pointer finger and pointing to it with her left hand. _The first for when you took Delight to the Sunless lands and Delirium arose in her place, even if parts of Delight can still be here from time to time._

Xir middle finger joined it, as she pointed to it. _The second for Destruction, our brother the Prodigal, leaving. You have always blamed that on when you left, and on his helping to find you and pushing another Oan to suffer for their contact with our family._

Xir ring finger next. _The third for when you took our sister Despair, for you love the new Despair as you do Del and Dream._

Xir pinky finger. _And the fourth to punish yourself, after all the endless days for yielding, as have I, as I have so many of the rest of us, to a simple moment where your function ceased to define you solely and you became a you beyond the job. You, like Dream and Destiny, have never been good at that even if the rest of us can. You see your role as Death as your role with all of us, being the one who does your best to take the Prodigal's place.....and none of us can fill his shoes even if we want to. You gave Dream the right advice when Morpheus was free, but he did not accept it because it was not in his nature to. But you know the truth, and you know what you must do even if it is hard for you to do it._

_None of us are simply our functions. I make people want things, so I know more of want than others._

Golden suns met an endless darkness, as Death looked at Desire with resignation leavened more than slightly with bitterness.

_I said that there is nothing to judge when I found you, and I meant that. I did not make you sleep with the demoness any more than I made dream sleep with the Oan, or the human woman, or Bast, or Thessaly, or any of the others. You let yourself be a person instead of your function. People are messy, sister dearest. They are flawed. They, we, all make mistakes. Some worse than others. You let your body go into a realm in another place and gave yourself to a demoness that as I said is the least destructive demoness of the entire lot in that set of planes. All you lost from it were four flight feathers and one of them taken in a bid to save the life of people that the only demoness capable of love loved._

Desire's laughter was much colder than her voice, giving with it the impression of the deep frosts of Niflheim.

_Besides, if the Morningstar sees those prospects he shan't be the only one. I suspect that the Allfather will be sniffing around too. Odin never misses a trick to seek to postpone Ragnarok, and after the favors he has done for the Endless in the past, I fear him with that feather more than I do the Morningstar. The Morningstar wants petty vengeance for petty slights. He's the Devil, he has always blended phenomenal cosmic power with the most petty spite and childishness for their own sakes. The Allfather would seek to bind you as he has the Skywalker, and thereby to escape his intended fate._

_And with that feather the demoness marked, and the demoness herself?_

Desire's smile faded and a shadow crossed xir face.

_Odin may have found a way to defy fate. And against that? The Morningstar and the Lord of the Gallows. The King of Asgard and the bitter eldest son who still has not forgiven his father even when Elaine Belloc sits on the throne of Existence._

Destiny nodded.

 _And that is why the conclave. The warning has been given._ With that Destiny raised his hand and his siblings were back in their own realms, save Death, who placed her head back on the desk.

_**I don't want to see Raven again. I still think of her, sometimes. It shames me but I do.** _

_She showed you a new thing, sister. Desire is right that even you are allowed to enjoy pleasure from time to time, and that we have all made mistakes._

Death looked up and was surprised.

_**Your book.....** _

_Yes, the book is closed. I don't need it to know what it is that I must say here. You are my sister, all of you are my kin. I lost a sister and a brother, we all dad. Our family endured. We cannot afford to lose you._

_**Is there a chance of that?** _

_In truth, in the sense of a final loss? No. In the sense of you becoming lost in your function again and becoming more remote than the prodigal? Yes, there is that. And that is why you must face Raven again, and let yourself, and her, work your way out of the situations that have arisen. You must face her and the princess of the Vegan system. This is not you sister, it was not even Morpheus, truly. You told the demoness you are not like any of us, and that is the truth. You are more than all of us. I am more powerful though given only five times to act until all things end, but you have the greatest affect of all of us on mortals, who have and do create us all._

_You have let that wear you down many a time, sister. This time, instead of leaving, it led you to seek solace in the arms of someone you sought to be able to give you all you sought. Mortals have no better answer to this than we do. The physical and emotional and psychological storms that grasp them may operate on smaller scales, but the results can be no less painful. To seek that release does not solve problems, it can create new ones, and lasting ones._

Destiny looked to her for permission when his hand went to her damaged wing and she nodded, and he gently caressed the bone and the holes where the feathers had been. He winced, as he looked at them. Desire did heal the pain, but.....

He seemed to truly see and Death was confused that his book remained at his side. Destiny appraised the wounds very closely.

_The demoness was not gentle, nor was the alien. This is more than nerve damage, your....._

He fell silent.

_**Now you see why I'm crippled.** _

_You know I have always seen it._

Death stuck out her tongue. _ **Pedant.** _

Destiny let himself enjoy the luxury of a smile. **_There's the sister I know is more than just the mask in her job. You can heal this, sister, but not without confronting Pride. She and the alien dealt that damage, and you have to let them be the ones that undo what has arisen._ **

_**This seems.....** _

_Contrived? None other but them have dealt such a wound to an Endless. The demoness is a healer, and the princess of the planet in the Vegan system knows more than most about the use of physical pain as a....motivator. For her kind the demoness is an apex in the virtues that mortals esteem. Your wing won't heal unless....._

She flinched at the touch of his finger on the third wound, and the jagged crater exposing what was and wasn't bone. Even with Desire's anesthetic, that.....tears flowed down her face and Destiny's hand jerked away.

**_I know you didn't mean for it to hurt that bad but it does._ **

Death sighed. _**No, you're right. I.....we.......I will go to them. And see what must be done to set this all to rights. Is there anything else I should know?** _

_The demoness's older brothers seek to set their circle of Hell to rights. That does not concern you and they have no interest in anything involving you. They just chose.....to take a mite too long for their original purpose and had poor timing. There are reasons that the sons of Trigon did not take over their father's former circle. Deciding to time their attempt to secure its fortune to the time when the Morningstar finally made his move illustrates that rule._

Death couldn't help it and made a sharp bark of laughter.

_**Well that's true enough.** _

She bit her lip.

_Good luck, sister._

Death wished to ask Destiny why he alluded to direct intervention but found herself back in her apartment.

_**I.......am not used to that.** _

She laughed, a more bitter laugh than her usual.

She picked up Cavendish.

**_You? You're coming with me. I've had a life where a teddy bear is the closed thing I've got to a friend and the only physical beings I interact with are goldfish._ **

She looked around her apartment.

_**.....** _

_**All things considered, Cavendish, you're a better friend than most.**_ With the bear shrunk and placed in her pocket, Death folded her wings, using her umbrella as a support.

She sighed.

_**Well, here goes nothing.** _

With a flick of her finger she turned out the light in her apartment and vanished.

LUX, JUMP CITY:

"Well, now."

_**Yes, my love?** _

"She's coming here, Maz."

_**Death?** _

"Yes."

_**Is that going to be a challenge?** _

"It spares me the extra time to summon her with the feather and fight her in her own realm to call her here." 

_**Mm.** _

"That said to be a fly on that wall when the daughter of Trigon and her girlfriend see their....former partner again."

Lucifer smiled as his bar opened again. Into it stepped a small figure in a bowler hat.

"Woo, that Superman, I tell you."

"Ah, Mxyptllk."

"Oh hey, Lucy! How the Hell are ya?"

"Well enough, I suppose. The usual?"

"Yep."

With that the fifth-dimensional imp got a massive mug of foaming beer.

"How do you do this this amazingly, Morningstar?"

"I have the power to create and maintain my own universe with all of this and I amuse myself by serving idiots beer."

Mxyptllk shrugged and drank the beer pleasantly, enjoying the taste. Nowhere in existence had better booze than Lux.

ZANDIA:

**So this is it, eh?**

Belial looked at the statue.

**One of the very last traces of our father since his eradication.**

The statue memorialized their father as he wished to be seen, a towering cloven-hooved giant with four eyes and vast horns like Belial's, not the relatively puny antlers that marked the head of the true Trigon. He had a cape with a vast fringed star and a scepter in his hand, Ruskoff snorting at that.

 **Ah, his formal wear.** The angels stride about wearing no clothing at all and bearing nothing worth concealing **. We wear clothes from modesty and we, somehow, are the sultry and tempting entities. We eschew incest on all planes of Hell within the ranks of demonkind, Gods......the only virgin in a pantheon is a goddess that can outrun her siblings.**

Ruskoff, shrunken to a more human size, enjoyed the disproportionate sound of his footfalls as he looked at the rewakened and terrified Brother Blood, whom had been 'gifted' with humanity in a manner befitting their father and clad in the old garments of the Cult of Skath's high priest.

 **Brother Blood** , Ruskoff rumbled. **You faced our sister before our father fell to her. Tell us what you know about her and her team.**

"You....Lords, you must know more about them than I do."

Skuge laughed, coldly. **Oh we do, human. We wish to gauge your honesty. You led a cult and mutilated and rebuilt yourself to score points on a teenager, so we know you're perfect for a servant of lords of a plane of Hell. That's when you're the master, and you can afford to lie. Now show us what you're worth as the servant.**

THE SILVER CITY:

Zauriel. The voice of the being now the Presence, once Elaine Belloc, on the throne was warmer by far than that of the old Presence.

**My Queen.**

**You were right. The Morningstar's ambitions did involve the individual among the Endless you said. And they shall bring in the demon's daughter you have said should be admitted to the Silver City.**

**You still see otherwise?**

**She captured an Endless and ripped feathers out of her wing for the sake of a short-term advantage for a team that even at a normal lifespan she shall outlive by several billion years.**

Zauriel clicked his teeth, for there was nothing to say. 

**She shall learn, my Queen, as we all do.**

The Presence nodded slightly, conceding the point in turn.

**Soon, Zauriel, you shall go down to California.**

**Milady, I cannot face the Morningstar.**

**It will not be you who faces my......uncle**.

Her gaze turned to the visage of the towering entity with the greatsword in the scabbard at his side.

**Father?**

**Yes, my Queen?**

**Has my uncle always been like this?**

**Yes, my Queen.**

**My predecessor threw him from Heaven for a reason, didn't he?**

**Yes, my queen.**

She facepalmed.

 **Uncle Lu** , she shook her head.

**Very well.**

It was then that an entity appeared not on Earth quite as she expected, but before both of them, looking around, confused.

Her black eyes focused on Elaine Belloc's, as she slouched on the Golden Throne.

**Hello, Death. Long time no see.**

Death held her hand in front of her eyes until her eyes adjusted.

As they did, Elaine noticed this and her slouch became a much more regal posture, and her eyes focused on the clipped wing. 

**You have not healed your wing? That.....you should have been able to make the feathers effortlessly. You are an Endless.**

Death's lips were tight.

**I have been told that enough, by enough people. I was seeking to go to Earth, not here to the Silver City.**

**I know, Death. I know everything.**

**My Uncle will be looking for you.**

Death nodded.

**This is going to be about more than the feathers.**

**Believe me, Lady of all that is, I am very well aware of that.** Elaine and Michael made no gesture at the seeming disrespect, aware of how much Death's wing pained her in the Silver City where the power of the anesthetic that shielded the pain was no more.

**As long as you know. Be careful, Death. You were a good friend to me, that day with the Basanos.**

**I know Destiny told you all that he could tell you, but he never tells you everything. You are hurt, and you are not used to functioning with anything like pain, or limitations. None of you among the Endless are.**

**Be cautious**.

Death accepted the warning.

**Oh, one other thing. Zauriel and my father shall go down to the Earth before all this is over. My uncle shall speak to you thrice before all is finished. At no point shall you tell him that he shall face my father, or Zauriel.**

Death nodded, not bothering to question why.

**To echo your brother, good luck.**

Elaine smiled as Death vanished again.

She looked to her father.

**Ah, my uncle. Has he really always been like this?**

**Always.**

**Mm. I see why my predecessor kicked him out of Heaven, then.**

Michael laughed, for a moment.

**You might say so, yes.**

Her eye turned to the Earth, clicking her teeth slightly. 

**Before I knew what I was, let alone who I would become, I actually met Raven. She'd just come to Earth and I thought she was one of the spirits of the dead I could see.**

Elaine smiled. **I wonder if she'd recognize me now.**

Michael was silent, not knowing what to say.

Elaine shook her head in turn. **My uncle was doing so well letting go of the past, he'll grow out of this.**

Michael could not quite resist an acidic: **I hope that Earth endures the results of him doing so.**

Elaine's smile was cryptic and nothing more was said.

THE NEXT MORNING, TITANS TOWER:

Raven woke up in her bed, enjoying the sight of Starfire curled up against her and her own eyes awake. Yesterday had been long, after the battle with Cinderblock and the set of stories told and then training to take everyone's mind off the two rival forces that could not be easily dealt with. Raven still did not regret the way her demonic side craved the companionship of multiple people, though then again she could not quite undo her nature, not that she hadn't tried for so long. Nor did she regret doing whatever she had to do to keep her family and her friends safe, even now.

She shook her head slightly. Today there was the not so wonderful pleasure of hearing all the myriad ways John Constantine would not so subtly front-load 'I told you so' in the background while trying to explain all this to the League. The only thing that could make this better would have been Death herself showing back up.

"Finally."

_Waited a while for me, eh?_

"Ten minutes. Not that bad when I can cuddle you."

Raven snorted.

_More like you're afraid to touch me when I'm asleep._

"Not afraid, just.....not entirely sure I want to be swimming the tendril sea on a day when we contact the Justice League."

_Eh.....point. I suppose it would be embarrassing._

With that, Starfire lowered her lip to Raven's nipple as Raven's magic began to caress Starfire, both of them vowing to enjoy a morning quickie. Yesterday had been stressful, today would not be less so. If they had a moment to enjoy that pleasure, well.....they'd take it.

THE OUTSKIRTS OF JUMP CITY: 

Only a pair of bums sitting around a fire in a garbage can witnessed the man step from the shadows. He was clean-shaven and one-eyed, with a very tall hat like that of a witch. An aura clung to him, one of a battle and of sorcery, of fire and fury and of the ending of worlds and their beginning. In his right hand he had what was neither quite staff nor spear but seemed to be both depending on when and in what way the bums looked. The aura of blood and fire and death that clung to him carried with a heady element as well of frenzy, and it was by the most conscious effort of will that they kept away from whatever new meta-thing reality had coughed up to face the Titans.

Odin turned to the two men and gave them a single dismissive look and strode forward.

There was a chance for something very rare for him here. Not simply to postpone Ragnarok, but to overthrow fate itself. Consultation with the Norns and with Hel had confirmed his visions, and now he was ready.

He was the Roarer, the Gore-God. He was the High One. He was Odin, and he had come to save his people. And nothing. not even Lucifer the Morningstar himself, was going to stop him. Odin felt the blade tied behind his back with a smile. A thing from the forges of the future foe of the Aesir, a weapon meant to lay low even the mightiest of the angels. 

Odin strode into the city, calm and confident. A single man, one of the various desperate products of the Jump City underworld whose boss had been wiped out in a clash not with the Titans but with the HIVE gang before the Titans stepped in, himself wounded and able to parlay this into a comfortable living, sought to mug the Lord of the Gallows as he arrived. A single look from Odin's eye and the man ran, fearful of what he had looked upon. He knew the stories of Wonder Woman, he'd seen Troia fighting with the Titans. But that? Even starvation wasn't enough to make him face that.....man, or what was not quite a man but something both immensely more powerful and so much more dangerous.


	5. She's in charge of the cards that read 'Have mercy on your soul'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven and Starfire meet an old friend, Grimnir goes to a library.

TITAN'S TOWER, RAVEN'S ROOM:

Raven and Starfire walked out of the shower wearing nothing but their towels. It had, for a rare change, actually just been a shared shower given the desire on both their parts to look formal for the League. The blend of heat that still remained from the shower and from their barely-suppressed desire that twinged annoyingly given a small taste of denial met an abrupt contrast when a slow and horribly familiar chill stalked the room. Both of them froze, following the sudden appearance of shadows on a very bright day that Starfire relished and Raven had come to enjoy because one of her deepest loves enjoyed it for the sight of her enjoyment.

The shadows had a kind of foreshortening effect and before them stood a woman in a tank top and jeans and boot and belt, all as dark as her eyes, which were those pools of flowing liquid darkness. So was her hair, the Eye of Horus beneath her right eye, and the color of her lips. And those claws that made Raven flinch slightly. Those elements were the same as they had been since that time two years ago. What was not was the only partially suppressed trembling of her legs and her reliance on the thing that was and wasn't an umbrella as a kind of cane, and likewise with it, the damaged appearance of her wing. Raven froze, seeing something of what Destiny saw immediately. Desire had kept it from becoming infectious or some Endless equivalent of gangrene, but the damage to that wing....

_What happened?_

_**You of all people should know what happened to my wing. Both of you.** _

The person standing before them did not sound like the Death they knew then. Then she had been the warm and kindly Endless, kindest of them all. Now she was a woman embittered and in pain, Desire's balm finally giving out in the presence of those who had caused the injury.

_**Like on a bird, those feathers cannot be just ripped out without damage.** _

Death took a deep breath, though she did not truly need to breathe. It offered her an excuse to close her eyes and fold her wings back. Arousal twinged in her at the sight of both of them clad in nothing but a towel, the familiar curves of their bodies and a flash of unwanted memories. It occurred to her then that she was.....

_**I did not time my arrival well. The Silver City and......the clipping both skewed my sense of timing. More the latter than the former.** _

With that Death turned and opened the door and shut it.

Starfire looked at Raven.

"Well, now what?"

_I don't know. She doesn't look....healthy, does she?_

"No."

They both decided to hastily get dressed, Raven's dress and cape white, along with her hood. Starfire's the more revealing kind of bikini-armor that she had taken to wearing as she'd become older, counting on its appearance as a minor advantage in a fight as indeed it proved to be. Both floated to the meeting room where a stain showed Donna had dropped a coke and the rest of the team were puzzled at the appearance of the strange winged woman clad all in black with skin of bone hue and eyes and hair like darkness captured in a small and fluid form.

Gar smelled her and the truth of what she was and became a mouse, hiding in the pocket of Wally, who couldn't quite take his eyes away.

"I saw you, once."

_**Yes you did, on a mountainside. I wasn't the only one you saw there.** _

"Y-Y-Y-You're Teleute."

_**I have not been called by that name since the time before the democracy of Athens.** _

Donna blinked, cocking her head.

"Did Raven's deal expire or?"

_**No. This is not about that, not in the way you think.** _

She extended her wings and the team blinked at the sight of the clipped one, Victor and Donna audibly gasping, though none of others perceived it, and Gar squeaking with concern at a strange smell that extended from the wing. It was not decay or infection but it was.....he had only encountered it once during the clash with the Black Lanterns when the Titans had broken one and sent it back to its grave. Given that one was the Black Lantern Martian Manhunter, a being as powerful as Superman in one sense and much moreso with his shapeshifting that granted him full access to other powers as well, that was a major feat. It was the smell of Nothing, of the Void.

The rest of her was a sense of countless odors that would have beguiled him into following her anywhere, and the mortals were awed and struck silent by her beauty. Only Raven and Donna were not fully so and even then they were likewise entranced, if at a lesser degree.

Death sighed, then turned to Raven. 

_**This starts with those feathers you two ripped out of my wing, and what you've done with one of them. It starts there but I have a feeling it won't end there.** _

With that Death decided to exploit a brief opportunity and teleported into Raven's room, bypassing powerful wards with ease, looking straight at a feather shielded with a power that would daunt both Morningstar and Allfather. Yet it was hers, it was a part of her, and her wing ached very painfully at the sight. She bit her lip. Maybe.....

Her gloved hand reached for the feather only for the power within the wards and within the symbols engraved into it in her own blood to lance into her and shock her, hurling her back against Raven's wall with a boom that rattled the entire Tower and blew out windows on the uppermost floor.

Raven phased up from the floor and crossed her arms looking at her.

_I found out how those people in Venice barred you from that place for centuries and added a bit of extra from the power on that feather. You won't get any of them back unless I allow it, and since your own power wards it away from you, it should be safe against anything else, too._

Death smelled smoke rising from her and her usually messy hair was standing on end in a quasi-Afro produced by the equivalent of a powerful electric shock. Her umbrella was blown out of her hand and when she tried to take a step without it to call upon it, the distortion in her balance caused her to stumble forward, though she gritted her teeth, straightened herself, and walked straight to the umbrella to reach it and then moved with less effort with its strength enhancing her own.

_**So you're not just a thief, you make me part of the theft.** _

Raven glared, eyes taking on a hint of a reddish tone, the crimson glow freezing her slightly.

_You came to me, in more than one sense of the word. You asked me to fuck you stupid, and I did. You came closer to killing me than my own father managed on what I expected to be my last day, and I exacted a punishment more draconian than I had ever had reason to expect because I was desperate and tired of seeing my friends and I put through an emotional circlejerk neither I nor my powers can afford. You knew I was a demon going in, little Endless. You don't get to have buyer's remorse when it turns out that even a 'good' demon insofar as we are capable of such a thing will burn those pretty fingers to the bone your function makes of so many things._

Death's look was sharp likewise.

_**You crippled my wing. I should have been able to heal it and I cannot.** _

_Frustrating, isn't it? The most powerful of the Endless and the only true rival to the Morningstar and Demurgios in their rank, perfectly free to defy all rules and now you are like everything and everyone else, limited. Stunted. Bound by things not entirely of your choosing. I did not intend this when we took the feathers. I expected given your power that you would simply create more._

Death's gaze did not stop her body traversing Raven's body in turn, lingering on parts of her visible waist, legs, and her cleavage. Seeing this Raven closed her cape around it, the way she used to do as a teenager.

_After ranting at me like this now you're gazing at me like we're going to go back on that bed again? No. You and I both know that was a bad idea._

**_Why?_** Death's tone changed from hostile to an unintended and almost petulant-sounding hurt.

_Well, your feathers have drawn at least the Morningstar to my city and to one of his twisted games. One of the few entities in Existence that can run over me like a Hummer would a roach and he's interested in myself, and my family, for a game._

_And you're here, again, angry and yelling at me and trying to hide the tears of pain that's been dammed up for years and can't be anymore. I wondered what it would be like to see you again. I didn't think it'd be until I actually ended._

_**You will see me then, yes.** _

Raven nodded, stiffly.

_I expected so, yes. I thought I could wait a few decades and would enjoy dying in Kori's arms, or at least someone I love. Not alone, not like that time in my father's......_

_And now you're here and we are both letting out bile that's built up since that day and nothing good is likely to happen from either of us exploding at each other. If I had known that taking those feathers would have been that much of a mess, we would have probably contented ourselves with your belt or something else that would have served the purpose just as well._

_**What, a trophy?** _

_No, proof that it, that you, were not some conjuration of your brother's realm. The belt wouldn't have done...._

She looked Death up and down, her arms much more visibly trembling with the exhaustion and the way her pain did not help matters.

_It wouldn't have done this. You weren't hurting like this right when you got here._

Her hand began to glow blue. _I can help._

The runes on the feather blazed with a powerful light that froze Death into place, leaving her with the unfamiliar feeling of being beholden to a will not her own. Part of her raged within, feeling this more stingingly than most of her kin or most people would. Feeling revulsion at the sensation of her wing in the touch of those who wounded it. Then the blue light touched the damage and she gasped, even under the control. It was like Desire's anesthetic, but.....

Raven suddenly fell like a stone, convulsing and bleeding from the mouth and the eyes. Death blinked in turn and took her sigil, which glowed, as Starfire, who'd heard Raven fall to the ground blasted open the door and surged in, hair trailing fire and eyes glowing in wrath. The glowing sigil did its work and Raven was out, unconscious.

_**She takes pain when she heals, doesn't she?** _

With the blood vanishing and Raven's stable unconsciousness, her own pain resurged as it had been and Death bit her lip, refusing to yield to it and to weakness.

"Yes, it's her curse when she uses her powers to help people."

Death clicked her teeth.

 _ **Well, she couldn't take the pain an Endless feels past a point. None but us can**_. That last was not a statement of boasting, as it would have been with most of her younger siblings. It was melancholy and amplified by her moving down to lift up Raven, by her lips thin and jaw set firmly, dragging her with a painful and glacial slowness to a bed she placed her upon with a surprising gentleness.

Kori could not resist not-so-small spasm of jealousy and more than slight envy any more than Death could resist slightly enjoying the feeling she'd remembered in memories and oh so briefly knew in truth. Then she got a closer look at Death and the charred appearance of her clothing and the electric-shock effect on her hair and that became concern. 

"Do you need-"

_**There is nothing of mortal medicine that can help one of us. My own power turned against me, and it hurts me no less with just what it is, and how much it is.** _

Raven floated in a healing trance and Starfire took the umbrella that had been kicked away in moving Raven from the bed and handed it to Death, gasping in shock at how so slight-seeming a thing was the heaviest object she'd lifted.

_**Thank you. I will see about getting my own room here.** _

Death stepped out and in a smaller scale use of the charm an Endless offered, soon had one of the vacant rooms a floor beneath Raven and Starfire's. In the lower levels, just beneath the old room of Tara Markov. She moved out the tiny Cavendish from her pocket and he grew to a fuller size and in a slight motion of her head, Slim, Wandsworth, and her hat collection appeared with her. Death looked around. Not her realm, but enough traces of home to do while she helped to fix this.

She did not like admitting to herself two years on that her 'mistake' left her feeling emotions she did not know how to feel, and that they had spiked astronomically when after that argument Raven had done the noble thing, the hero thing, and tried to help her and then fallen into a healing-trance. It would not take her long in mortal time to recuperate, maybe six hours. Death put her hands back on her head in another version of the same gesture from the conclave. Well this was off to a brilliant start. Her wing's pain felt sharper, or maybe it was just the backlash from....everything...that made it seem so. She held Cavendish tightly and tried to sink into the couch and not move for a while.

She felt the Justice League arrive, but didn't give a damn. When they found out that Raven was in a healing trance and that it was because of her and that she was here......

She held Cavendish still more tightly, trying to find solace in Slim and Wandsworth. She wasn't as lonely as she had been, but she felt that loneliness even in its lesser form never more powerfully than she did here. It wouldn't matter, at one level. Even crippled there was nothing anyone but the two who took her feathers could do to her at any level that meant anything. But it also would, at another level she couldn't parse. Mortal rejection and fear stung. It would sting worse when she gave it more credence than she wished.

JUMP CITY LIBRARY:

The tall man in the pointed hat stepped into the library, spear seeming as a staff. The aura of menace he exuded terrified most who laid eyes on him. He gave off the impression not merely of war but the most frenzied and chaotic and senseless elements of war. Only one eye and thin but not even the burliest of Jump City's inhabitants, including Baran Flinders, who was enjoying off time from HIVE activities to check out one of his guilty pleasures, a Harry Turtledove series. A new one, this one, about World War II starting in 1938. Flinders deliberately stayed away from the man who part of him felt a desire to attack to prove worth for something he felt calling to him, but the aura of horror and fear....nope. Books it was.

Odin strode through the library confidently, finding two books. One the only published volume known on the superheroine Raven, the White Queen of the Titans. Derived from a mixture of interviews and the like, Odin knew it would not be entirely accurate but if there was anything he was gifted at, it would be turning a basis of knowledge into something much deeper.

The other.....was from the _other_ John Dee, a helpful look at Enochian. To live by the sword was to die by it, to face Angels with the kind of power that was capable of reducing even the greatest to thralls yoked to the power of the creator of Asgard and Aesir and Vanir and Svartalfar and Ljossalfar and even Jotnar, bar the towering figures of Niflheim and Muspelheim that predated even him, well.....the Morningstar would be overconfident, his manner always was. He would be arrogant and prideful and the old distaste between them recently stoked by the Wild Hunt would amplify this.

Odin smiled coldly. He also knew _she_ was here. She would not intervene, her goals would work in unity to both of theirs even as she tried to work against them. He'd felt the instance when she had sought to regain one of her feathers and been hurled back by the use of her own power turned against her, a feat that impressed him. These heroes might be beneath the kind of games he usually was involved in but their power was not to be idly dismissed. Nor the intellect, if they had had the sight to recognize something simultaneously obvious and yet not at the same time. He smiled more broadly as his power meant that he easily checked out the books without the formal means to do so, using the name 'Grimnir' as in the old days. He was Father of Victory but victory cheaply won would be worthless.

Two ravens cawed as they looked down at him, and he nodded, sending them to keep eyes on the Tower. He noticed a very tall brunette woman with a glamour concealing her mask and damaged voice, and turned to her and with a cold smile rubbed the back of his hand on that side of his face. Her snarl was very audible to him and she vanished as soon as she realized he'd made her. 

LUX, JUMP CITY:

Lucifer too had felt the boom when Death slammed into the wall, hurled by her own power, and the nature of what could have done this likewise occurred to him. A low whistle, and a murmured: "High marks, daughter of the eighth circle. The next generation of the inferno is in good hands."

With that, he looked at a few of his older plans and shrugged, altering them with a gesture he'd taken from an old human sitcom, as they were called, preferred by some of his older clientele. With a twinkle in his eye he even deliberately created something of the sounds that went with it.

It was then that a very young-seeming man who looked surprisingly like a man out of the medieval era at one level, stepped into his bar. He casually hung up his coat and stepped up to it, saying "Give me the strongest ale you've got."

Lucifer calmly obliged him, and then the man took his first draught of it.

"Still not Jewish, but now they can say that the Devil and the Wandering Jew had a beer," he smirked.

"Ah, Mr. Gadling. I had never anticipated our paths would meet. What brings you here?"

"Looking for what came of an old unpleasant acquaintance of mine. Heard he started calling himself Immortus because nobody would recognize the name Wallenstein anymore."

Lucifer smiled.

"I think those young men and women in that Tower could help."

"Ah, probably. You know, I wonder why you're here, in point of fact. For you, slumming around a city full of superheroes seems....tawdry."

"I have my reasons."

"And I was not born yesterday and have no interest in what you're doing, only wonder. Getting involved in the Devil's business tends to go.....poorly."

Lucifer's smile was deceptively welcoming. "How astute."

"Where's your fluff piece?"

"Maz? She sensed the arrival of an.......acquaintance and wished to confirm it."

"Ah. Not my drinking buddy, I hope? Last time I saw an Endless was when Morpheus croaked and as pretty as that one is, I still have Gwen and all."

"And where is the lovely Gwen?"

"On a press junket in Metropolis, working for the _Daily Planet._ Safest damn job in a superhero-burg there is, in all honesty. I intend to join her, I just need to make sure Immortus isn't sniffing around here still. He was annoying in the war, he'd be even more insufferable now. Damn Bohemians."

With that Gadling finished his beer, paid for it, and stepped out with a calm whistle. A few seconds later, Mazikeen materialized by Lucifer.

_**You were right, my love. Odin is here.** _

Lucifer's lips became tight.

"Ah, capital. This should be amusing, then."

He went back to polishing his bar. The TV on the wall noted at one level a broadcast from FOX, specifically the Simpsons and Ned Flanders saying "If you listen to this network, you're doing to ding-dong-diddly Hellerino!" with Lucier smiling, and at another level something he heard more closely from the few angels who'd sought to side with Sandalphon back in the day and still did so with him.

_She is sending Zauriel soon._

Lucifer cleaned the bar a bit more intently. Damn. He would have to decide to up his timescale even if the Sons of Trigon insisted on getting in his way after all, then.


	6. Now Ophelia, she's neath the window:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Justice League meets Death in Titans Tower, the Devil encounters the Terminator, and the Sons of Trigon make their opening move.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

The Justice League arrived in a flash from their teleporter, eerie energies dancing up and down the walls of the room, papers blown around. Seven people, always seven, the League hovered or stood, respectively. At the furthest left was Barry Allen, the Flash, who was content for the moment not to need to tap into the speedforce. Next to him the brutish-seeming force of Atlan of Atlantis, dour and brown-skinned with a thick beard, clad in his bright orange and green armor that shone with a brilliant hue and gave off the briny odor of the oceanic depths. To his left was Diana of Themyscira, her skin an olive hue just a small shade lighter than the dark brown of Aquaman's, clad in thigh-high boots and a variant on (and this was an irony that always amused Donna and Diana, though less so Antiope and the Queen) Roman armor with the skirt and breastplate designed accordingly, the symbols of the Twelve Olympians on her pauldron. They were, however, in a red, white, and blue hue, the skirt dark blue, the belt a belt of stars of brilliant white, the breastplate a deep red. The pauldron was a dark gold and her bracelets unadorned iron.

In the center hovered a man who had on a dark blue outfit like an old-model circus strongman's outfit, a leotard that had almost a dancer's fluidity to it. His red cape was flat against his back, arms crossed against his chest. His appearance seemed human outwardly but his powers, derived from exposure to Earth's sun, reflected a physiology of stunningly alien elements and origins.To his right was a tall woman in an old-school magician's outfit, her legs in fishnets, wearing a top-hat and a cane much more lightly in her grip in an unconscious show-woman's posture, her skin the palest of all of them. Her eyes gleamed with crystalline sclera, a trait of her Homo magi subspecies, and her presence gave off an aura of powerful magic. She sought to see if she could sense Raven, and did feel her soul-magic healing her body in a trance. Raven's power was on a different kind of order, a divinity that could casually rewrite reality in a human container. Homo magi like herself and Constantine were bonfires. Raven was Sirius, a vast star that gave off light to dwarf even the Sun. 

And there was _it._ The Endless. The concept given a personification, Life and Death wrought into the ageless form of a mortal woman with bone-hued skin and vast albatross-like wings. She was two floors down from them, and her presence was smothering. Diana sensed it, sensed her, too, and sought to grab at her sword, which had the rest of the League tensing up. Aquaman sensed a presence powerful enough that even a feeble mystical sense by comparison to that of his queen could detect. If Raven was one of the mightiest stars in the sky.....the Endless made her feel as if she was nothing at all. She was all things and in all things, and time meant nothing to her, and the feeling was so powerful she had to consciously use an exercise to shut it away and the memory of what it was, and who it was.

To Zatanna's right hovered a green man clad in a strange kind of pseudo-leotard with a bright blue cape. J'onn J'onzz likewise sought to feel for where Raven was, her psychic presence was usually comforting and familiar, but....he felt her presence in the trance and one of his eyes widened slightly, the equivalent of raising an eyebrow for a human, and he made a soft Martian oath.

The last of the League, but not the least, was a brooding figure in a batlike cowl with a fringed cape who crossed his arms over his armored chest, his eyes glowing within his cowl via the special elements worked into it to enhance the aura of menace given off. The Batman, the only true mortal on the team, and its secret banker.

The Titans looked at their mentors with a mixture of wariness and concern.

Zatanna spoke first: "Where's Raven?"

Starfire steepled her hands and coughed for a moment. "She is.....healing."

"Why?" It was Batman's voice that was heavily leavened with suspicion. "Also, why is it so....cold here?"

 _ **Because I put her there**_ , spoke a voice that was dulcet and at one level affable and kindly, and at another displayed an edge of pain and humiliation at feeling it.

As one the team pivoted to face a woman who had materialized out of thin air, with two great wings, one clipped, the other whole. Zatanna, Superman, and J'onn immediately recognized her.

'H'ronmeer' He saw her as a towering figure of darkness leavened with fire, an old abstraction of his homeworld made manifest. The rest of the teams saw the pale girl clad in black with hair and eyes of fluid darkness. Zatanna's showman-posture with the cane contrasted with her concealing her weakness incompletely, slight trembles in her arms and her jaw clenched firmly betraying elements of it.

"How are you here?"

_**Isn't it obvious?** _

Her eyes of themselves went to her wing, and Zatanna started.

"How?"

_**It's a long story. Do you really want to hear it?** _

"Uh....yeah."She snorted. 

_**Very well, I asked Raven to fuck me, she did, along with Starfire. I nearly killed her at the height of pleasure and as per the laws of hospitality she exacted her vengeance by plucking four of my flight feathers from one of my wings. I cannot heal the feathers, and there are entities that are seeking the feathers.** _

The League stared at her blankly, all jaws but those of the Batman and Superman open.

It was Zatanna who said: "I can't tell if you're joking or not."

Death's eyes narrowed and her damaged wing moved slightly, a small hiss of pain following from her lips.

_**Does this look like I'm joking?** _

Zatanna blinked.

"Uh.....clearly not." Gulping slightly.

Superman broke the silence that followed for some of the longest three minutes that followed, "Well, leaving aside any of the precise....details.....why is Raven unconscious?"

_**She tried to heal my wing, believing that those who dealt the damage could heal it. Her healing relies on taking in the pains from those she heals-the Titans started with an awkward look on some faces and blank horrors on others, and those of the League that telegraphed their emotions blended shock and regret-and she tried to take on the pain of one of the Endless. It is only because of the oath I was made to swear to her that she is not in the Sunless Lands a few million years before her time.** _

The teams started again.

_**I assure you I meant no malice, and for your sakes, I'd suggest believing me. We of the Endless do not bother with combat in the way you do, but you could not fight me any more than a planet can fight the gravitational pull of a star.** _

Barry and Victor and Atlan raised their weapons all the same, as Death shook her head slightly.

"We don't respond kindly to threats."

_**It's....not a threat. Merely a statement of fact. I am Death of the Endless, the anthropomorphic personification of Life and Death. I am there in all presences of death, the evil and the good in the eyes of mortals alike. I do not judge, I do not reject. When the first life was in this world, I was. When this life in this corner of Existence ceases to be.... I am.** _

It was Barry who scratched his head, his lips moving and then he raised his finger.

"I thought Nekron was Death?"

Death shook her head. _**He is a parasite that feeds on the energy produced by my function. He calls himself the entity of Death, yes. And he has the scythe that mortals expect to see.** _

She closed her jaw tight, willing herself not to fall, and transformed her umbrella into a very long scythe that flipped itself over, the haft on the ground. It was not a true scythe, for the 'metal' did not have the luster or the properties of a true metal.

_**So do I, when I need to. I do not use it often, only for formal occasions.** _

Not willing to chance transforming the umbrella back and flipping it over until after the fact, she looked to them.

_**So here we all are. What of it?** _

"Anything that draws Lucifer Morningstar to actively intervening in human affairs is a concern of the League," Superman spoke. 

_**You can't possibly believe you can fight him.** _

"We've beaten more powerful entities."

Death's smile was cold.

_**No, you have not. You have faced the New Gods, and they are next to him an armadillo next to a car. Only three beings in creation were his equal. The Presence herself, Michael Demurgios....and me. Well, my older Brother Destiny is in that group too, but he never leaves his gardens.** _

"Were?"

Death didn't stifle a low moan of pain when her clipped wing moved.

_**Yes, were. Those feathers that were.....ripped out....mean a bit more than one might think.They are essential to my fulfilling my function.** _

She bit her lip.

_**I can still do it, mostly. But it means that against the Morningstar, he is my superior in brute force, the way only the Presence and Destiny have been before now.** _

She sighed, slightly, looking down.

I'm not used to that. When you take for granted having.....everything, to merely be the equal of Michael Demurgios feels worse than it is.

"Merely the equal of Michael Demurgios, she says." Zatanna scoffed. "You have more power than the most powerful supervillain could imagine and you see this as a weakness."

Death gave her a level stare and took the calculated risk of letting go of her scythe. She stumbled forward and managed to right herself, and Zatanna stared for a moment.

"I....stand corrected."

Death then stood upright, anchored on what was now an umbrella again.

So what precisely do you intend to do about the Morningstar and the Sons of Trigon?

"Well, nobody can stop the Morningstar, so we're going to hope for the best and wing it on that one," Superman said, calmly. His lip quirked slightly. "The Sons of Trigon are an easier matter to deal with."

"He's got a point," Atlan nodded, and the teams nodded in turn.

"So what, we just wait for the Brothers very grim to attack?"

Batman moved, then, and spoke with a surprisingly calm, even soft tone: "Zandia is a sovereign country that has said it would take a JLA presence on its soil as an act of war. So.....yes, for now."

Everyone turned to Zatanna.

"So what do you know about Raven's brothers?" It was Nightwing who asked, and Starfire's eyes narrowed slightly at his eyes focusing on Zatanna's legs, before she shrugged slightly, deciding she'd see if Raven would let her take it out on her when she was better.

"Not that much. Trigon's three sons were known quantities for a long time, his daughter....we discovered when she showed up to ask us for help." A shadow crossed Zatanna's face. "I have regretted nothing so much in my life as not accepting her original plea for help when I was the youngest member on the team, thought I had much to prove, and didn't understand much at all. Now...."

She clicked her teeth.

"She's an ex, of sorts. I want to help her."

Death's wings twitched slightly and her eye likewise, as a spasm of an emotion she did not quite understand surged through her, but she resisted the unfamiliarity of it focus on the rest, her eye twitching slightly and fingers clenching tightly on the umbrella.

"There are three of them, and I'm sure her team knows more than we do. What's known to occultists are their names. She can speak them without the risk of summoning them. We cannot. They form a quartet. The eldest is War, the second is conquest, the third is famine. And the fourth, the one also known as Pride? She is the...she is another that goes by the name Death." 

Death smiled with a quirk that was indecipherable to mortals, before looking at the rest of them.

_**I do not do this combat thing, but as Zatanna said, I am 'merely' equal to the Demurgios in raw brute force. At the worst extreme, I will do what I can to help.** _

Silence pervaded for a tine, then the League insisted on speaking to the Titans alone, and that left Death alone in the meeting room. She bit her lip, then a look of determination set in. Her power warded the feather, did it? She was more powerful than any son or daughter of Trigon the Terrible. She teleported back to Raven's room, staring at the warded command feather with determination. Placing the umbrella at the side of the bookshelf nearest the feather, and bracing herself with her other hand, the look of determination in her eyes intensified, and she reached for the wards, and then pushed with the fullness of her strength. 

Every single light in the entire Western hemisphere went boom bar one incongruous one in Raven's room, shielded by the same power that turned on her, striking her with her own function turned against her, the planet briefly rocked on its foundations, Titans Tower shook in a miniature Earthquake at the highest level which only the regenerating alien metal kept from destroying it entirely, and a mystic pulse entirely visible on Oa and in other worlds rocketed out into Existence itself, the attention of the Guardians of the Universe suddenly focused on Earth. The blast was powerful enough that mystics worldwide went into seizures, a few of the less powerful taken by other presences of Death, that Psychics were in brief, temporary comas, parts of the ocean boiled away from the seashores worldwide for a few hours until the waters rushed back, every bird in the air over Jump City fell from the sky, airplanes were saved by the passing presence of Power Girl and one of the Green Lanterns, and both Zatanna and Raven bled profusely in the wake of the blast.

Death fell to her knees, smoking, her own power burning her to a point that she looked at herself in a mirror, not Raven's enchanted mirror, but another. Her throat was charred with a diagonal slice of carbonization, and two fork-like burns with two tines went down both her arms. Death whined in frustration. The smoke of her skin and her hair and her body pervaded the room, though its mystical nature and origin meant no fire alarms went off. As the Tower reconstructed the windows in the surprisingly quick time it took the regenerating structure to do so, the League rushed to Raven's room, bar the unconscious and twitching Zatanna, whose face and shoulders dripped with blood. 

Raven's body was marked with wounds on her shoulder and face, and the room was filled with a dense smoke that made people cough and shiver, the smoke reeking with the odor of the grave, and the sense of loss. Barry moved in in a flash of speed-force energy that cast a weird witch-light through the room, though the smoke moved through the slowly closing and healing windows and eventually dissipated, leaving the figure of Death, hugging herself and with the new scarring on her body, the wards around the feather visible even to non-mages and glowing with a brilliant hue, and another figure, clad all in white, with long flowing white hair, and eyes that were pools of infinite darkness.

The League froze.

"Dream," it was Wonder Woman who spoke in awe.

**Hello, grandmother.**

She blinked, then her gaze was still more wide-eyed.

"You can't be Daniel. He.....he's...." 

**I am Daniel and yet I am not. I am Dream of the Endless.**

He looked at the glowing wards, and then at all of them.

**My sister came to this place alone, last time. Now she has been grievously injured.**

His gaze looked to all of them, and then he strode over to Raven and formed a bilocation of himself to stride to Zatanna, his hand extending over both of them and repairing their bodies in a minor use of his powers.

**You see what holding her power captive costs her, and all of you.**

Raven and Zatanna were awake, now, and heard Dream speaking, and both paralyzed with a wholly different kind of fear. The Spectre had tried to destroy Magic but then he was an angel acting on what he deemed his orders. The Lord Shaper was a far more terrifying and mercurial figure.

**I will not intervene to repair bodies indefinitely. She will continue to try to regain her feathers, I'm afraid.**

He knelt down beside her, Death's head sunk down, refusing to let other people see her tears.

**You aren't alone, sister, remember that. They know we are _all_ watching them.**

Dream's smile for a moment was the cold and sinister one of the old Morpheus.

**_They_ won't like it if Delirium comes calling. _We_ , however, might find it amusing.**

Death nodded, and whispered, her voice jagged, stuttering slightly: _**I....I w-will try to make sure she does not have to.** _

Dream's whisper in her ear was quiet, tender, more the voice of a man than a concept:

**Then please, do not do this to yourself. The person who bound that power knew how to do it, and what they were doing. You could destroy this world altogether and your feather would still be lost to you, and then where would you be?**

Death broke down, then, and Dream held her for a moment and the heroes averted their eyes, granting them some privacy. Raven's eyes flashed with a thousand different emotions for a moment and in a shade of the old past, a lightbulb in her room sparked and went out.

\-----------

OUTSKIRTS OF JUMP CITY:

In the place where Odin had taken room and board, he remained quietly at work on completing his new weaponry, and the Enochian sigils. Huginn and Muninn had vanished into Asgard for protection when they had detected the Endless reaching for her feather again, and he had called upon his full extent of power to shield himself. Mortal mages bled and were unconscious. The God of the Aesir was frozen in place, his body feeling an unfamiliar and powerful electric fire, but where others would have been paralyzed, the Frenzy within him was galvanized. Such was the power of what he sought that the Earth literally rocked on its foundation and only the careful work of superheroes meant that life itself did not see a loss of nine in ten of all that was.

He smiled with a cruel grin when the moment passed. This was incentive. A very, very powerful incentive. And he would need to capture the one that made the feather, because what could block an Endless at the height of her power would utterly annihilate him.

\-----------

THE LUX BAR:

Lucifer felt the wave building and knew immediately what Death was going to do. He went to Mazikeen and held her, as she raised a single eyebrow looking at him. Lucifer did not love in the sense that most entities were capable of the emotion. He, unlike most angels, was perfectly capable of and willing to generate a penis, and alarmingly good with how he used it. None of that crossed her mind. What did was that the entity that embodied most of all beings selfishness and individualism grasped her and reformed for a moment in a timeless hold his wings, not the batlike things the Lord Shaper had removed from him, but the brilliant shining white angelic wings. Around Lux a great shield arose.

Then it hit, and it hit with a devastating force like Ymir kicked the bar in a rage, but such was the power of the Morningstar lit into its fullness that a brilliant light shone, however briefly, and in this entire neighborhood of Jump City, only one was unaffected by the blast. Maz's look at Lucifer was never more awed than when he faced the backlash created by the power and desperation of Death like another day. Even then, his eyes twitched slightly and his teeth ground, and when he let her go, his limbs trembled and he fell to his knees, for a moment. She averted her eyes, knowing the Devil was never more dangerous than when at his weakest.

 _ **Such power she has,**_ Lucifer exulted for a moment in old Enochian, the command tongue from before the Great Revolt. _**I was too modest with my goals.** _

He rose back to his feet after a few minutes of replenishing his strength, then went to his bar. The neighborhood around it had survived fine, other things had been shaken by that power.

One of them sprawled with an ungainly presence right outside his bar, clad in an outfit neatly divided between black and orange, one eye visible on one side of the face.

_**Well hello, what do we have here?** _

The TV in the bar began to echo with a mechanical thumping sound and a heavy drumline as a muscular man clad in his birthday suit made his way to a group of criminals to seek them for clothes, and the Devil casually picked up the Terminator with a flick of his wrist and flung his unconscious body into a chair, the frown and sneer of cold command on his face.

\----------

ZANDIA, TEMPLE OF SCATH:

The wave of power left Brother Blood and Mother Mayhem frozen and cold before the Sons of Trigon, who were all awed at the scale of the power therein. 

**_So that's an Endless. Extraordinary_ ,** mused Skuge.

He turned to his brother, and their nominal king.

_**Should we still try for this? I have a feeling we won't be the only ones looking for our sister. I would not welcome the kind of encounter with what else might be.** _

If the former King of all the planes is here, he won't care about us one way or the other. This is family business. Ruskoff's hands clenched on his throne.

_**The cult is dead, may it rot. They served their purpose.** _

He looked to the city.

_**Our sister's wards can't shield us out, and the Lord Shaper has taken his leave.** _

_**Your point, brother?**_ Belial scoffed.

Ruskoff turned his gaze toward him and for a moment he was a mirror of his father.

_**We go to her, and we make our demands. Now. Now, when everything's reeling and the fear of those others will make them seem reasonable.** _

Ruskoff smiled, and then the brothers nodded to each other and vanished in a flash. 

None of them noticed the raven watching them, and they would have been horrified to see the thin man with the one eye and the spear taking the spear, and deciding to teleport to where they were materialized.

Little wonder then that they had not rebuilt the glory of the Malebolge-that-was, and little wonder that their sister had so little to do with them. Odin smiled. This would slake the frenzy and the thirst for gore and slaughter, and humble the proud children of Trigon.

OA:

The decision was made with a minimum of muss and fuss. The Green Lanterns of Earth would be reinforced with all due swiftness. Nothing less than the fate of life itself demanded it. Only one before had tried anything like this, and Burgess had, for all practical purposes, won a hollow victory that was Dream's own doing.

This? Somehow, in some way, part of the power of one of the Endless had been bound, a surprisingly large part. Seldom did Oa flex its strength like this, but seldom did it have so very good a reason to do so.

En masse no less than a thousand Green Lanterns turned to the Earth, the only restraint the absence of killing. Against the power of the Allfather and the Morningstar they would be bugs smeared on the windshield, but the Earth might endure when it came to it. And against the wrath of the Endless, Dream of the Endless in particular took notice of Oa in a way most of the family did not. Perhaps that would help. If not....the Guardians would have to take action themselves.


	7. 'Plans within plans within plans'

JUMP CITY, OUTSKIRTS:

The Sons of Trigon teleported from the ruined palace destroyed by what human newscasters were already starting to call The Event. The Earth had literally rocked on its foundation, and no known supervillain was involved. This did not stop a few opportunists from seeking to claim responsibility and triggering clashes with local superheroes that went forward to oppose them. The Sons of Trigon knew all too well what had caused it, but they were stunned when they arrived to find not their sister waiting for them but a deceptively old-looking clean-shaven figure with one eye, clad not in the clothes of Grimnir but in garments of red and gold, an aura of menace and the smell of blood and guts clinging to him.

In his hands was a golden spear of inhuman work, and over him circled two ravens.

**You are not welcome here, children of the Malebolge. There are gambits afoot that render your quest immaterial. Cease and desist, or go forth wailing to your circle and cast down by a great force.**

_**What force, old man, you?** _

**I am known by many names. The High One, Lord of the Gallows, Roarer. Worker of Evil. Victory-Father, Allfather.**

**I am Odin. It is not to me or to my preference to take a battlefield directly.**

And he raised the spear, which gleamed with a reddish hue and the smell of slaughter intensified, the Sons freezing in place in uncertainty. 

Ruskoff laughed, coldly and cruelly.

**_So you are a coward, then?_ **

Gungnir was hurled over their heads, landing with a sharp edge that fractured the ground and created a miniature tremble that ripped through it.

From the skies descended a great chariot led by goats, one slightly more halting in step than the other. In the chariot was a hulking titan with a vast and inhuman build, clad in furs with a great belt and an ursine and leonine (in different aspects) mop of red hair.

**I do not take the battlefield directly.**

The chariot landed and with a colder smile he turned to the Sons as the giant moved from his hip a hammer that began to crackle and spark with lightning.

**My son, Thunor of the Thunders, child of Earth, he enjoys a good fight. I have allowed it and your deaths with Gungnir.**

Odin began a great chant, working a mighty work of Galdr upon them and the Sons snarled in turn.

_**We are Belial, Ruskoff, and Suge, Sons of Trigon, masters of the Malebolge. Mumblings and incanations from gods abandoned by their followers to another do not deter us!** _

Thunor laughed, a great elephantine roar of triumph and Mjolnir sparked with lightning, and was hurled forward. The Sons in turn called into themselves the fullness of their divine heritage. Ruskoff, King of the Malebolge in name swelled to become a titan, thin Skuge withered grass and rocks crumbled where he stepped. The hellfires of Belial burned, and a clash of rival divinities began in thunder and the roar of Thunor as his hammer hurled Skuge to his feet and his great strength absorbed the fires of Belial with no ill effect, the hammer returning to his hand easily and then slamming against the calf of the left leg of the titanic Ruskoff, who was hurled onto his back.

Odin watched and Odin drank in the rush of the battlefield and the demonic frenzies, his Galdr-chants speaking in the flashes of lightning and the peals of thunder, in the bellowed howls of demons and hisses of hellfire that proceeded in great streams. Gungnir drank demonic ichor as readily as it did that of the Jotnar in the old days and in the present likewise in the eternal now of Dreaming and myth-land. Lesser might the Sons of Trigon be in the wake of the father who leveled worlds and the daughter who level the world-devourer and smote him and made him no more. Lesser in this sense was still fiendishly powerful.

Great Jotnar had been ruined in single strikes of the Mjolnir and merely the crushing power of Thunor's fists. The hammer had left no more than a mark of charring that healed with an assertion of will. Hellfire burned with lesser shades of Muspelheim (and no effect on Thunor save to enhance his enjoyment and the destructive power within him). The lightning that destroyed many and many a creature would rip open holes, but the demons could and did close them. The Earth trembled and winds howled, and yet Thunor's hammer struck the demons to its soil and his lightnings negated their strikes, and Gungnir's hunger sapped their presence, the ability of their physical forms to hold together in the presence of their sister's wards.

Against her own kind they could not ward out lest they destroy her, yet indiscriminate enough were they that as the power of a lesser manifestation sapped itself, even they, if not the creator of the wards, began to feel them as an extra heaviness in their limbs. And through it all, the Galdr-chanting merged seamlessly with the noise of battle. Each great blow of the demon-princes went awry while none of Thunor's did. His father's pride in his combat and the strangeness of offering before the one of the three brothers who was most active in ruling directly meant that each of his blows was a son appealing to a warrior father's bloodthirstiness, and a god offering to Odin, God of the Gods, in the purity of arms and the berserker frenzies at work within him.

Nine blows did Thunor strike to each demon-prince.

Nine times did their ichor fasten into Gungnir which gleamed with a bloody hue as if it thirsted with a never-ceasing hunger (and in truth it did).

The demon-princes, their strength sapped and their essences beginning to wither, then saw Odin call to himself Gungnir, and striding to the battlefield as Thunor's lightning formed chains that held them down. Nine times had Thunor struck, and nine chains for the three demons.

Odin raised his spear above them, his Galdr-chanting becoming more ominous, the croak of ravens slaked on the flesh of the fallen, the lever on the gallows carrying with it the hanged condemned to die. The death-rattle of a corpse and the brutish sound of a weapon impacting with flesh. Magic surged out of Odin and the Allfather's power slammed into the Brothers Three, and the nine chains that held each flashed likewise. Nine flashes and the Demons Three were cast back into the realm that had released them, and Odin's breathing was heavy, redolent with an aura of blood and decay. The spear had drunk the blood of the feather-mistress's blood.

"I have what I need. My gratitude, son."

Thor turned to his father.

"Do you wish me to stay?"

His voice was much lower than Odin's, the thunderclap rewritten into sound.

"Yes, son. With us, when we go to claim the object we seek, shall be Ingvi, Master of Vanaheim. He has not arrived yet, for he waits the counsel of his sister-wife."

Thor nodded.

"Then we strike."

"Yes, then we strike. Gungnir shall grant us the victory, and I shall take a great pleasure in humbling the egotism of the Morningstar."

Thor, seldom the wisest among the Aesir, ventured a question wiser than most from him:

"And if others of his kind appear?"

"I shall allow them to sort out their own sorrows and go to the Tower and claim the Feather directly, and its others with it. Four feathers from the wings of Death, and in them the answer to prevent harsh fate."

Thor nodded, quietly, and accepted his father's wisdom.

As they departed, Superman arrived to look at a cracked element in the ground like the edge of a new fault and smelled a strange odor. Magic, very powerful magic, but a blood-magic, a red-magic, a grave-magic that called to war and frenzy. When Superman realized his eyes were glowing with a fierce heat, his breathing had accelerated, and that he was aching to find and slaughter something he sped with a blur of his glowing eyes back to the Tower. Whatever that was was dangerous if it could make the farm boy from Smallville feel like the Norse he'd read about on the Stamford Bridge.

\-----------------

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM: 

The rest of the day passed without issue, the teams enjoying the chance, mostly to socialize and even to play with the not entirely thinly veiled competitive edge between the teams. Three times had the League and Titans gone to face each other. Thus far it had been one win each and one draw, and that edge provided a sharpness to jokes and displays of juvenile bravado even from nominally grown men. Only Clark and Bruce were above it all, sitting at a table and enjoying some genuinely good coffee made by Donna Troy, who was talking to her sister in a low and worried tone, the two the most somber of everyone.

While they were not involved directly in the competitions, Starfire and Zatanna were in an arm-wrestling contest putting one of Zatanna's enchantments for strength against the full power of a princess of Tamaran. The tower seemed to tremble under its wake. Conner and Atlan likewise were in a semi-wrestling and boxing match and both greatly enjoying themselves, with Bruce giving a headshake smacking of more than faint scorn and Clark shaking his head indulgently at the antics of the boy who was like a son to him, though Jon had not yet reached the time where he could join the Titans. A variety of dishes were cooking, animated by the spells of Raven and Zatanna, and that had Garfield distracted at points watching something that was...actually rather interesting. Only two were absent, and their absence reflected the more sharply on the rest of those present.

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN'S ROOM:

Death sat on Raven's bed, barefoot but otherwise clad in her own clothes. Holes were burned in them in part, and the carbonized hue on her throat and arms stood out the moreso against her arms and the bone-hue of the rest of her skin.

_I did warn you that you were not going to regain those feathers unless I allowed it, and I warned you that your power was put into both of them. I cannot restrain them against you, Endless. Your power, bound in your blood, is what restrains them and binds you to that service._

_**I am not meant to be bound, Raven. You know this.** _

_You came to me and asked me to bind you in the bedroom and gave me an opportunity and a necessity. One cannot kill Death. Despair, yes. Dream, yes. Other Endless, eventually...yes. You can be hurt, emotionally. You can be bound, but slain? Hurt in the sense of your siblings? Never. No sorcerer claims a bargain with an Endless if they are wise without a means to shield themselves from retaliation._

Death glared.

_**By that standard of wisdom nobody who has sought bargains with my family was wise.** _

Raven's glare began to turn red as hell-light danced at corners of her eyes. 

_Proves my point, doesn't it? They made the bargains and then Dream had his wrath unleashed upon them. Or your brother, or Delirium. I took parts of you and I have lived, and my team has lived, with a blessed sense of assurance from what was never meant to be._

_**You did not alter my function in truth. Everything dies, everything will come to me in the end.** _

_Perhaps, but I can spare my team an emotional merry-go-round that plays havoc with all of us all the same. And so I have. We've been through this particular hamster wheel enough._ Death found herself silenced as the rune burned, and tears flowed down her cheeks, and humiliation that so simple a thing stung the way it did. 

Raven looked at Death again more closely, and went over to her, more gingerly and with less anger.

She put her finger on Death's chin and lifted up her jaw as Death looked at her curiously, as Raven's lips thinned and she bit them, a slight 'pock' sound following releasing her lower lip from her upper.

_For what it's worth, I regret that it did this to you. You couldn't walk without the umbrella with the earlier wounds. What do these do?_

**_My legs are fine as they can get now. I......_ **

Death's hand felt the carbonized area on her throat.

**_I feel....I suppose I feel what mortals call numbness here. I cannot destroy myself any more than anything else can, but that power still can do this._ **

Raven lowered herself to the bed besides Death and then pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them.

_Well, we sure fucked this up, didn't we?_

_**Yes, we did,** _Death's voice was soft, and her eyes traversed around Raven's legs and the curve of her ass visible in her dress, and between them. The hunger was visible and Raven's empathy mirrored as it did all emotions, her eyes going to Death's.

 _My team swears since I lost my virginity I've become the biggest horndog in the superhero community other than John Constantine,_ Raven murmured.

 _ **Well, it tells in your skills,**_ Death murmured in turn, her hand reaching out to brush along Raven's bare flesh. The arousal built and Raven cast a brief soundproof charm and a very powerful mystic screen.

_**I have missed this, and wanted this, since the last time. I will try not to hurt your back.** _

_And I will try not to take anything more than I've already taken._

With that Death flicked her first two fingers on her right hand slightly and the two looked at each other's bodies and what the passage of a few mortal years since their last time together had done to them. The buildup was its own foreplay to one with Raven's gift and her slickness contrasted with that of Death's, which mirrored hers. Death hoped that after the mess of the last time that this would get it out of her system, even as Raven's hand moved and chains of flowing darkness coated in red eyes and fanged mouths reached out and tied her to the bed, her legs spread without the need of such help, and Death's tongue slipped out of her mouth in eagerness.

Such was the power of the wards that canceled all mystical awareness and that of science and amplified in this by the power in the feather that Raven's eyes going to four glowing crimson hues that burned in Death's own infinite blackness that drew the gaze of the four like a Sun of blood and her body growing in mystic power made no impression to Zatanna. She straddled Death, her tongue slipping out in that long serpentine shape, and then the two were kissing ferociously, the desire built up too much that neither could quite shake the resistance to it. Part of Raven's Aspects within her cast still more powerful shields around her room and then the Tower. No shaking it this time, there was too much at stake. Yet....they wanted this just as much as Death did.


	8. At at a feast where they'll kill him with self-confidence and poison him with words

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

As before, Death found herself unclad and bared to the sight of an entity that looked at her with four blazing eyes and a deep and abiding hunger. As before she was bound by shadows with eyes within eyes within eyes. Unlike before, there was no tentative hesitation here, the power of Pride, of the rider on the pale horse named death before Death herself was unbound and glorying in its own existence. Death excitedly licked her lips, eyes traversing the demon's body as she strode forward, sauntered the more accurate word. Death could not resist an audible gasp when the entity that had kissed her, thrown her on the bed, stripped her, lowered herself over her, levitating slightly off the bed.

_Mine._

A single word, and then the entity's hand slid along her body.

_The mortal regrets taking the feathers. So do I. Koriand'r likewise though she is too afraid of the Endless to apologize to the woman._

With that her tongue extended out again, rasping along the carbonized flesh. Death felt nothing there, not even the crudest sensation of the tongue, and that disturbed her at one level.

Her smile became weaker:

**_Just don't touch my ankh, OK?_ **

_Never fear on that account_ , and then the demon levitated backward, hands moving in a kind of fashion like a tape in rewind, levitating between Death's legs where it lowered its head and she was soon giving Death the pleasure of her own lips. Death groaned, hands bound, incapable of moving them. Before the clipping she was strong enough there was no danger involved. After it.....in a technical sense, yes. In an emotional sense, for the first time in her endless existence since she'd laid down her burden in the ancient Azarath beside the many-faced goddess, there was and that too excited her with a delicious tremble of fear that pulsed through her in tune with Raven's pulse against her thighs, in tune with the tongue and lips and fingers that moved in a slightly jerking and almost stop-motion aspect at some levels and a brilliant blur to rival that which meant her Black Flash form existed for a reason.

Four red suns burned against the white thigh, lips and fingers continuing to move and the soundproofed spell held with Death's pleasure silenced and the rippling power that reverberated in the room likewise muffled to a point that Zatanna could not sense it. Death wailed in her pleasure and Raven, after giving her nine orgasms, looked up with Death's cum smearing her face and dripping from her lips. Four red suns blazed with hellfire and the demon formed a very big fanged smile worthy of the Joker before blurring around and maneuvering so that she sat on Death's face.

 _You know what to do_ , and indeed Death did it, as Raven leaned back, savoring the image this would have presented to any observer. The second mightiest of the Endless, embodiment of the concepts of life and death, the true executor of life and the executioner of life likewise eating her out with a fiendish glee, something in her that ached given a small relief, and a small balm. The rune began to glow on her feather and Death lent her power to extend the wards not just in the room, but around the Tower. Raven had felt the banishment of her brothers, and knew that they would not accept a single defeat. And that the being that had banished them was not going to passively wait around. Beyond that, she felt Him, the Morningstar, former King of all Pandaemonium and its vast environs, and that sunfire next to her bonfire left her afraid.

Silence awaited any mystical being trying to peer within the tower and her wards, even as those in her room and in Koriand'r's became a whole new kind of intensity, and even as her thighs quivered and her own orgasmic wave echoed in four orgasms that built until her powers took the form of a great black bird, her soul self extending its wings......

Raven sank on top of Death, who was freed from her bondage, and the two sank briefly into a mutual nap, clutching each other as Pride receded, her gratitude to Death increasing with the second time, and her attention focused on the damage within her wing and its nature. The wings were real and symbolism and more than that, besides. And the infection there, the wound, was at the one level a seeming kind of gangrene that had necrotized and ossified and yet not, and yet a genuine threat with and within and to the body and presence of Life and Death as concepts. That was a puzzle.

Not an irresolvable one.

Death felt the transformations of stars into ice and the disappearance of some of her presences elswewhere and a small chill began to walk up her body as the twinge of pain her wing increased. Another flight feather fell out, hitting the ground with a boom that the same element that limited sound in sorcery left silent.

LUX BAR:

Even the Morningstar felt the sudden pall of invisibility in that room, though the one with the other feathers remained visible, and it brought him short as he continued his examinations and modifications of Slade Wilson to serve as pawn, as beater to flush out game, and a mortal rewarded unambiguously for a true deal with the Devil. Somehow, the daughter of the Malebolge had secured Death's own power to work as an augmenter of her own, a task that would require him to do one of the few things that with all his power he was uncertain he could do. 

Overawe the will not of a horny and desperate Death who gave in to one of her only true weaknesses, the ancient and devastating sense of loneliness, but of Death the eldest sister of the Seven, cosmic embodiment of the beginning and end of all things, who would outlast not just the other Endless and her parents, but he himself and the Presence, whoever or whatever sat upon the throne at that point in time. Death did not have an automatic claim on his soul before that long-distant reality came due, but in the end, even he would come to her. It chafed at him monstrously that the half-human abomination sired by the soul of a departed thing that had once ruled a mere plane could do all this.

Then his thoughts paused and he left Slade Wilson to Maz, to finish the modifications.

It was a trivial task for one such as he with the power of Creation to call up a shade of the deceased, even an entity that would have been a lord of one of the old circles.

What was called up was not the true entity itself, for its power was broken and that which had broken it had broken it so only one such as the Morningstar could have resurrected it and undone it.

It was a gaunt thing, as gaunt as its son Skuge, with four glowing golden eyes, and great horns that extended from its face with a single tine, modified. The way it wished to be seen rather than what it was.

**Why am I summoned by you, Abdictator-General?**

Trigon remained as insolent as ever, and the Morningstar's glower did not change that, nor the gaunt thing crossing his arms around his chest.

**_Your daughter has done a strange thing, Trigon._ **

**Raven? What of her? What has she done?**

_**She has ensured four of the flight feathers of Death taken from one of her rings, and used one of them to have Death's own power become the bars in her captivity.** _

**So like Burgess and the Lord Shaper, then?**

**_No, I do not believe so. Burgess held Dream because Dream wished to die, and used his captivity to get himself in the right mood for the day and the hour and the manner of his death. She has bound Death in a rune of her blood, a rune that only she can move. You are not my equal nor that of the Demurgios. The Endless have not spoken to her directly to show her some such secret, or I would have seen that and seen those elements._ **

**You are one of the sub-creators, how do you not have answers?**

_**Neither Michael and I are omniscient as well as omnipotent. That was my father and is Elaine now.** _

**Hmm. All powerful but not all knowing? Pity I never knew that when I was alive, else I would have tried to ascend your throne and show your corpse your head.**

A small taste of the Morningstar's power brought Trigon's shade to his knees, binding him in spectral chains meant to torment a lord of daemon-kin.

**_What part of you is restored exists as long as I allow it._ **

Trigon snarled, a guttural thunderclap that smote the soul and the mind.

**You are no king, Lucifer.**

**_Not now, but I was. And you would be wise to remember it._ **

**You wished to know how my daughter gained from me the power to subdue Death? It is not in me, and it is not in Arella. The Goddess Azar has many faces, Son of Yahweh. Not all of them are kindly old women who take and discard mortal flesh and give birth to their reincarnations by parthogenesis.**

Trigon's smile was cold and unwelcoming. 

**If she gained it from anyone besides herself it would be Azar-as-judgment, the titan on a great golden throne with eyes of fire, but even then I suspect that is not the true answer. Children can surpass their fathers. Students surpass their teachers. Azar-the-loving and Azar-the-Undying Flame and Azar-the-Purifier, Azar-the-Soul Severer taught Raven things as my own voice within her taught them likewise. She has surpassed us, Morningstar.**

**You look to the feather and to the rune, but what is magic next to the hand that wields it?**

**She had the power as my appointed architect of destruction to enable me to seize mastery of life and death themselves for a time. Death in her apartment endured because as one of the Endless I wished more power, to recover from my arrival before seeking to confirm that mastery.**

**Without myself as a burden to constrain, she still fulfills the function I assigned to her, if in a fashion less akin to that of my sphere.**

**The hand that wields the magic does not do so for the glory of the House of Trigon, but it is the one who painted the rune, not the rune, to seek and to seek to understand.**

Trigon's shade saw Slade Wilson and what Mazikeen was doing to him.

**That won't work, Morningstar.**

**_He rebelled against you, he could n-_ **

**You are the embodiment of rebellion, Lord Morningstar. What greater irony than to rebel against rebellion itself? Mortals are not so easily controlled as all that. Our kind are bound by pacts as this interwoven in their nature. They are not. You seduced the first lifeforms made by the Presence, you seduced the Mother of the Living and the Father likewise.You found that they did not obey you in full and in truth. You told them to eat of the fruit, all of the fruit, even down to the seeds. Each took one bite and cast it aside, and in that act found misery.**

**You told us all these tales in the days when you and your host came to Pandaemonium and made yourselves masters of what you aspired to rule. You have forgotten the lesson.**

Trigon's smile became more predatory.

**And that's without the Lord of the Gallows or what the new Kings might do with those sons of mine.**

Lucifer froze.

**_What do you mean?_ **

**Consider, O former Master. They have been cast back, they have a connection, real and undeniable, to Raven. Remiel and Duma, Kings of Hell, know a thing or two about cutting improbable knots and cleaning up the messes you left behind. My sons have gone down to them. What might your successors do with so fine a key to the lock that has been thrown into an anthill of mortals?**

Lucifer snarled and dispelled the ghost of Trigon though the entity's laughter lingered for hours even in his own standards of time after the dispersal. He remained brooding on his knees for a time, the hell-light in his eyes beginning to blaze like suns. Trigon's brains might have been in his prick but he was not wrong.

THE THRONES OF HELL:

Two angels sat on the great Black Thrones of Hell. One was perpetually silent and dour and clad in the full armor of the angelic host gone to war. In his hands he held a great sword with the tip pointed down. His were eyes that saw all that occurred in all the manifold realms. There were daemon princes perpetually at war with each other, and lesser entities that lied and called themselves kings and were not. Choronzon was one of them. Ruskoff of the Malebolge another. So too the creature Neron, the one that had been made a vice-regent of them in lieu of retaining the old lords of the previous king who might have sought a perpetual and futile strife against the new masters of the Inferno. Nine great Circles were the most ancient realm but there were others, many others. 

As many definitions of Hell and planes as there were people to imagine them and all of them obedient once to the Morningstar and now to Duma, Angel of Silence. To his right, and the vocal one of the new Diarchy in Hell was Remiel, an angel of Thunder and a being much like the glowering and brutish Thor of Asgard. He was unlike most angels, in that he was willing to take a task given him by the first Presence and then repeated with no uncertain terms by Ellaine Belloc, the second. And it was that very similarity that led the three high lords of the Malebolge brought to them muzzled and shackled by other demons that had risen as others fell to look uncertain.

With a contemptuous smile Remiel's hand moved and lightning severed the muzzles, though not the shackles. They fell on their knees before the High Kings.

Duma as ever was silent, but Remiel spoke for them both:

_You sought to revive your circle and you have failed._

Ruskoff, his pride undiminished even before the High Kings spoke after they all nodded:

_**We regret nothing.** _

_You would not be the Sons of Trigon if you did regret._

That silenced them.

_There are games afoot that you sought to evade but evade them you cannot._

_**We know something of that,**_ High King Remiel, Ruskoff said with a choked voice that did not bother to disguise the sheer rage flowing through him and the vital power it gave him. Something to do with our sister and one of the Endless. _ **No doubt the Lord Shaper, and his sister restraining him as is her due.** _

_You would be wrong_. Remiel's voice contained that aristocratic disdain as the demons' eyes blared and then widened as the voice sunk the more deeply into them.

 _You would be wrong,_ Remiel repeated. _It is not the Lord Shaper but the Wings of Life._

The demons froze.

_**The Eldest Sister?** _

_The same._

**_How?_ **

We do not know. In truth, I suspect that the Morningstar does not either. Somehow, your sister Pride bound Death to her service, through the use of feathers from her wing. A wing that's clipped. We have seen her but once in all that time since, and that wing appears to somehow be rotting, and starting to decay.

_**Death cannot die.** _

_No, she cannot. But she can be wounded, and her sphere unravel._

With that Remiel raised his hand and a vision gripped not just the Sons of Trigon but all Pandaemonium. _The world without Death where Hell itself became silent, not yet fully born beyond its first inmates, where reality unraveled and in a deathless world the stars began to neither be alive nor dead, simply spheres of unlight that gleamed with a strange element that at times was sickly brownish-green and at others ivory and gold. The fullness of what was seen and how that chaos built left the torments of Hell silenced in all its spheres, and the Sons of Trigon speechless._

**_Our sister risks this?_ **

_She does not know it, Death would not admit to it. The decay in her wing is not going to stop there, it will affect her. The alien and your sister that wounded her were not gentle. It is as much a wound of the mind and the soul as of the body, we believe._

With that, the Demons Three were given the same sight that Remiel and Duma had, and they looked out into existence. Something was beginning to happen for the first time since Death had left her function even as she retained it, and her ability slowed and weakened and so did she.

**_The stars are.......becoming that again._ **

_Yes, stars of cold diamond that glow with a light that is never fully born nor fully decayed. Without death physics breaks apart. Without death, magic does likewise._

They froze.

_**You believe she does not know this?** _

_We believe your sister does not. If Death does, she will refuse to admit it, is what we said._

The Demons Three were unshackled.

_You have our blessing and a power in each of you to match your father's of old, for the duration of this crisis._

_**Why so generous?** _This time it was Skuge who asked, glorying in his new powers, yet clotted and clipped by suspicion and uncertainty.

Then a voice spoke, flat and silent and ever-calm and monotonous. A presence made himself felt among them and even the angels looked with unease, as a cowled figure with a book chained to his wrist strode out, reading his own words from his book.

Because nothing less than the fate of existence itself is at stake, and has been since my sister's wing was damaged.

Lord Destiny, Remiel spoke with uncertainty and even Duma's eyes were wide.

Yes. They do not free you on their behalf, Belial, Ruskoff, Skuge. 

With that they found themselves branded suddenly on their left hands with the sigil of a book, the symbol of Destiny of the Endless himself.

I release you on mine. Speak to your sister, convince her to release my sister's feathers. She has struck her with her own power of Ending, and my sister being who she is, she will realize how hurt she is in time to come and hurt herself and Existence a third time before she accepts the truth. 

In the release of four there shall be the key to restore what is taken. You have your parts to play. Now play them. 

Destiny's fingers moved lightly and the Endless casually teleported the Demons Three from Hell itself, and then as casually vanished.

Duma remained silent but his fingers moved in a cosmic sign language.

Destiny himself is starting to intervene directly? He hasn't done that sinc-

_I know, brother. I know._

THE SILVER CITY:

**Now, Zauriel. Go.**

He knelt before the presence.

_**As you will it, Great Queen.** _

Then her eyes turned to Michael.

**You too, father. Go. For now......be as Atlas. Soon, you shall face my uncle. But not quite yet.**

The Demurgios vanished in a flash of light, steely determination on his face.

Then she looked at one other angel, a tall and fairly smug-looking one with a great broadsword with a serrated edge at points attached to his side.

**Uriel, go with Zauriel. He is the warning. You will be Judgment.**

Then, finally, her gaze turned to a figure clad in a kind of early twentieth century strongman's outfit with a green hood and cape.

**You remain here. Your judgment is too connected to the overlapping sphere with the heroes to be the kind that must be sent from our sphere. Uriel, my terrible swift sword, shall be the warning needed when the stars begin to die.**

He went down from the Heavens in a brilliant shining figure of fire and glory, a great sword at his side, his gaze determined. When he crossed the barriers from the Silver City into existence he saw the broader elements of Reality, of the manifold realms in the Multiverse proper and the Hypertime trees spawned from each Earth. In all universes, he froze for a moment, gazing in an old horror the angels recalled well from vingtillions of years ago when Heaven was young and a newly imprisoned thing had tried to rise from slumber and been halted.

Stars were starting to become as glowing ice, light frozen in its tracks, gleaming but not truly sent. Where the stars became ice, the sky became truly dark in those places, and the darkness was spreading.

**Raven, what have you done?**

He resumed his speed with still greater force. He then noticed a second light matching his own with an equally troubled expression and wanted to stop again but dared not. Anything that brought uncertainty to Heaven's Hound was not worth exploring too closely.

THE LUX BAR:

Lucifer felt Zauriel and Uriel's descent from Heaven and the return of the Sons of Trigon as he looked at the modified Slade Wilson, noting with gratification that Mazikeen's modifications as with his were meant to endure for the sake of this and then to be as a very strange dream.

 _Not yet, my love_. His hand was around her waist.

_But soon. Odin thinks to entrap me by Enochian, and the bastard knows enough sorcery that he could wound me, and that would be....unpleasant._

As they looked at what was around them, the Morningstar's eyes became closed in a different sense as he reached out to 'see' as was his due. Then they flashed open. He spoke in the old Enochian, as did she:

_**We may have waited too long, my love. I think we may need to move now, earlier plans be damned.** _

_Why?_

**_The stars are going out again._ **

Mazikeen started


	9. His nurse, some local loser, is in charge of the cyanide hole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Schemes interweave and collide and a Terminator decides to meet up with a con artist

JUMP CITY, DOWNTOWN: 

John Constantine had arrived two hours after the planet rocked on its foundation. He was glad he had when a few minutes later another smaller tremor shook the entire Western hemisphere. Now.....now he was slumming against a building lighting a cigarette, fascinated at how in a city where the mystic wards of Raven were as strong as they were the shadows at times seemed to drink in light. He knew the Morningstar was here, he felt him. Odin, too. Zatanna was in the tower and he was waiting on her to excuse herself from her team to meet with him, and hopefully to bring Raven to try to make sense of this mess. He wasn't lying to himself in admitting that part of him wished he'd thought of Death as a partner in the sack first. Then again, looking at the mess made of it with everything Raven did, he wasn't that interested in it.

Down the alley, a bar opened and he smirked, coldly. So that's where one of the big players was hiding. The Lux shone with an eerie light, and a bearded man with an eyepatch staggered out, his body empowered at points and yet his willpower continuing to try to fight it. Constantine's eyes narrowed. That meant trouble. When Slade Wilson staggered forward, Constantine casually put his hand on the man's very muscular chest, smiling appreciatively. Deathstroke froze.

"Constantine?"

"Slade."

"Wh-why are you here?"

"Same reason you are now, wanker. Tell me, whose claws are in you now?"

"L-Lucifer."

Constantine choked on his cigarette for a moment and then wheezed, gasping "Fuck me."

"All right then, come on."

"What?"

"Come on. This kind of thing is my expertise and if yer nice I'll even leave yer soul intact in the process, eh? You and your damn demon magic."

Slade glared, but both meekly and weakly complied.

THAT EVENING:

Raven and Death awoke in the bed, and Raven looked at Death's wing, Death still in a halfway state between dreaming and waking. Raven's eyes widened and her mouth moved in a goldfish-motion.

Death's vision solidified and focused on her and she said ** _What's wrong?_**

Raven pointed to her wing and Death's own eyes widened and she looked on the ground. Another feather on the ground.

Raven levitated out of the bed, heedless of her nudity, and picked it up, placing it within the other wards. Death followed her gaze, and winced as the pain in her wings that had been suppressed for the smaller amount of feathers intensified on a larger scale with the larger number with it. Raven in turn winced, her head aching with the intensity of the pain in the raw empathic-sympathetic sense, before turning to the damaged wing and reaching out with her hands glowing with a brilliant blue hue.

 _ **Don't,**_ Death whimpered. **_Last time you did this you hurt yourself._ **

Raven's eyes went from two to four and her skin changed, and suddenly it was not Raven's hand but Pride's.

_I made this mess, I can at least try to fix it._

Taking the feather from the wards, Pride looked at the wound.

_You.....you have a kind of gangrene here. How....how does a personification get gangrene?_

The feather returned to the wards as she stared in horror, Death hissing in pain.

_**I don't know, that shouldn't be happening.** _

_You're a concept, Death. Life and Death in unity. There must be...._ she pondered.

_Is it that our fucking cost you the feather?_

**_No, I don't think so,_** Death hissed, fingers clenched. Sex itself is neutral. **_There's something connected here, emotionally or....._**

Her eyes went to the wards, then back to Raven, then to her wing.

Pride's eyes followed her likewise, and she mused.

 _I turned your pow-Oh._ Her eyes widened and her mouth moved and then donning her own dress with a casual snap of her fingers, Pride stepped out from Death. She looked at her, at the feathers, then at her hands. 

And with that Pride suddenly vanished into her nexus.

Death sighed, clad with a thought and her umbrella serving as a kind of cane, helping herself to her feet and to stagger into the entertainment room where the Titans and the League fell silent on seeing her.

Starfire and Zatanna asked the same question in two very different tones of voice: "Where's Raven?"

_**She thinks she may have a clue as to what and how things are....affecting me.** _

Zatanna blinked, then her eyes narrowed, widened slightly as she saw Death's wing and her mouth moved in a silent string of curses, then she turned back to where she was and what she was doing.

LUX BAR:

Lucifer blinked when he realized not only that John Constantine had found himself (of course) in the middle of all these schemes, but that his initial gambit with Deathstroke was likely to misfire. He glared slightly. The shade of Trigon was right, trying to stake something grander on something incapable of bearing it had been a great mistake. Then again, as Lucifer smiled, all he'd done was ensure that Constantine would be busier undoing what was done to him. 

Lucifer blinked and then smiled again at a much deeper level when the new version, 'new' in the sense of being rebuilt since the Great Revolt, of his old armor as the former King of Hell appeared. With it, his new and modified sword that gleamed with the old runes. It wasn't the armor he'd used back in the day to defend Heaven from the Lilim, but it would do. Oh yes, it would do. He had a feeling that against the Allfather he would need this, for all his power. If it were an entity like the creatures of New Genesis and Apokolips a mere glance and the unmaking of the creatures and their entire dimension would do. Those entities were, in a sense, but the heroes of this world and the villains writ cosmic.

Odin was God of the Gallows, a being of war and slaughter. And he knew Odin would not be alone, and that it was not his writ or something that Dream of the Endless would accept to slay Thor. Only one entity in existence existed capable of such a feat, and for all his power, to supersede that and to try to be the Jormugandr would call up forces that near total omnipotence could steer but even he would not be fully able to control. Not least among them, he feared, the Lord Shaper and the Endless.

Donning his armor, Lucifer girded himself and prepared to go to war. Only a single thought troubled his musing slightly. It was not the feather he needed, he understood that now. It was the demon's daughter herself. An entity he could steamroll with raw power, to be sure. But then the father, Trigon, had been like that too. And yet a dead, dispersed-souled creature had defied him when in his power entirely. What would the thing that killed him do? An entity that had found a way to bind an entity his equal in raw power, and the true inheritor of the power of her plane?

As King he had not sought out confrontations with the lords of the manifold planes, not because they were true threats, but because he did not relish having to spend his power in combat against a being capable of registering a hit. It almost invariably would draw in his father, or his brother. And he had a suspicion born of his power that before all this was over, he would see Michael at least, perhaps Remiel, too. Fully clad in armor, his gaze turned to Mazikeen, seeing her clad likewise. 

_**You won't be alone, love.** _

He smiled his serpentine grin.

**No, I won't be.**

The two shared a brief kiss, then strode out to a confrontation that as the stars transformed into ice indicated had been postponed more than long enough.

FORMER CITADEL OF THE CULT OF SKATH:

With a sense of deja vu the Sons of Trigon appeared once more in the same hellscape outside of time and space and yet adjacent to the California coastline that had welcomed them before. Exulting in their new power and prowess and in their senses, they smiled and then with far less hesitation teleported out in a whirlwind of fire. It was time to pay a visit to their elder sister.

TITANS TOWER:

The first inkling the Titans and Justice League had (though not Death herself) of their new visitors was the sudden appearance of a tornado of fire on the outskirts of Titan Island. The second was that Zatanna and Diana felt the pall of demonic evil, a kind of energy akin to that of Raven's but where hers interwove darkness with a selfless compassion more angelic than demonic, this oozed a malice that seemed more like that of fabled Angband and Mordor of story and film. The malice carried with it the palpable psychic impact of a kind of demonic presence the Titans had known only once before.

On a day, long ago in the seeming though less so in truth when their teammate had vanished in a glowing sphere of white light and her demonic sire had erupted from existence and laid low the universe in his image and in his likeness. The fear that spiked through the Titans was palpable, even Donna, Wally, and Conner, who had never encountered Trigon directly fully sharing it. The League was not less affected, remembering the ease with which Trigon had rendered them statues likewise for his amusement, feeding off of the agony of their souls entrapped within the statues.

Only Death, who stood with her umbrella as a cane, was unaffected one way or the other, and it was her who teleported in a sudden vanishing to stand outside the gates of the Tower, transforming the umbrella into a scythe and standing with her wings, even the clipped one, out and staring directly at the Sons of Trigon, who froze in sudden shock. They had been told that it was her who would await them, but being told it was one thing.

Seeing the eldest sister of the Endless, the most powerful of the Seven standing in front of Titans Tower and giving them a casual stare in eyes of endless darkness underscored that being told something and seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, was something completely different. For a moment they were frozen into indecision, then Ruskoff shook his head and grinned with a wolfish smile, and began to speak.

NEXUS BETWEEN WORLDS:

Pride knelt by the still-fluid blood that gleamed with its iridescent phosphoresence on the rocks of her Nexus, her glowing hand over it, and her power focused within it.

_In blood there is life, in life there are answers, she mused. I did not want this one._

Her four eyes gleamed as she looked up.

_Damnation._

With that she vanished in a flash of black light and headed to Titans Tower immediately.


	10. Swords in the Night:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Odin and the Morningstar and Thor and Mazikeen face off for the Feathers of the Wing of Death. The Sons of Trigon have a second reunion with their sister, and Michael Demurgios speaks to Zauriel.

THE WATCHTOWER: 

Zauriel looked around in frustration. Too late had he come here, the League had departed, gone to the city on the western coast of the great landmass where the strange Feathers of the wing of the Endless were locked behind wards and chains that only the very greatest could move. His mistress would not be pleased.

_There, my friend, I must note that you are wrong._

His gaze turned, and then his eyes widened as he knelt in homage.

 _None of that, Zauiriel. Not to you nor to I is it given to move first. My......dear brother....has a confrontation that must be had, and then there is the matter of the sellsword he has sought to drag into business anew_.

Zauriel blinked, the name coming to him. _Slade Wilson? The man Trigon the Terrible conned into serving as his thrall, once?_

_The very same. Before I face my brother, I will ensure that man considers all of this a very strange dream. He is....unpredictable, and in him as well lingers some trace of the power of Trigon, of the kind that could induce in Pride of the children of Trigon changes that do not need to exist._

_And John Constantine?_

Michael's smile was cryptic, silence the only answer therein. In a flash of light both angels descended to Jump City, and stood at the threshold of an apartment warded with tremendous power, where John Constantine found himself gazing in genuine shock with a head that rang with the force of how frequently he turned it and in which directions he looked. Before him was a shard of power otherwise destroyed, not bound to the sons or the daughter, a force that had taken from the Morningstar a key to unleash itself. That shard had given Slade Wilson an eye that glowed with red light and hands that gleamed anew in fire. On the other side of the door, the only being to rival the Morningstar, and now with him the two most powerful beings in existence as Raven's little fling had quite literally started to unravel reality. 

"OK, I.........."

The voice that echoed from Slade Wilson's mask was not his own.

_**The arrogant fool that considered himself once King of our planes awoke my ghost to ask of me questions. Now....that ghost is dispersed but here is enough. Even in a shade of my own might, John Constantine, i am infinitely superior to your own.** _

It had been a long time since Constantine had heard the voice and felt the presence of the Demon Trigon, though he was relieved that the circle held, and held firmly at that, even with Slade Wilson squatting in his full armor and fire blazing and sometimes forming a great fire-devil around the circle, and yet the wards held.

**_I am fire, I am ruin, and none shall gainsay me against a reunion with my dear children._ **

At that John Constantine laughed.

"Dear children? You're about as good a father as the Joker at ignoring Batman!"

Trigon roared in wrath and Slade's eyes went from one to four, each gleaming with a brilliant light.

Constantine swore when he heard a single knock on the door.

If he could do this exorcism soon en-

The power of the Demon began to blaze outward again and the wards he set began to fail, as a grisly smile formed beneath the mask.

**_I am not the First of the Fallen to be taken in by some addict of a human vice who promises things and yet never delivers. It is beneath me to make bargains with my inferiors, for those who are strong dictate, we do not swear oaths nor are we forsworn!_ **

With that, as the wards shattered in a tremendous crash, the being rose from his squatting position and took his first step, one that echoed with a booming sound, as the wards around the apartment, strengthened to contain him within blazed with intensity.

Trigon reached for a sword on his back that had not been there until his power, bound within the mortal shell, had let him call to it. From its scabbard he withdrew it and it gleamed with a hellish red glow where his mark shone on both edges of the blade.

**_Get out of my way, huma-_ **

It was then that the knocking ceased on the door and to Trigon the Terrible's surprise, even in the eyes of his mortal shell, brilliant light flowed in and two entities followed. One was a brilliant sunfire in his armor, his sword visible and burning with the holy fire of the Silver City. The other had wings but otherwise seemed surprisingly human and very akin to the Morningstar, save that his hair was a lighter shade of blonde, straight where the other's hair was a mop of bright golden hair, and the piercing light in his eyes.

Michael Demurgios gave Trigon a condescending smile and then raised his hand and began to speak in Enochian as the demon roared in turn and lunged himself forward.

GAIMAN BOULEVARD:

Odin had not bothered to hide his presence, nor that of his son the Thunderer. It was here, on Gaiman Boulevard, between a cemetery and a library, the cemetery one where an old gallows had marked executions in the vigilantism days of early California and well into the history of the later California (with an equally unpleasant and bloody history of lynching to match that of the Old South). In his hands Odin held blades adorned with Enochian, in enchantments powerful enough that Lucifer was wary. Odin was a spell-crafter of tremendous power, and he understood enough of his foes to wield Enochian-adorned blades, the kind against which only Elaine's power was fully immune. Lucifer Star-Kindler knew he was mighty, but he also knew that he was not limitless. Nothing in Existence truly was.

Even she who would end him, her, and all of them was not, else he would not be here, now, for why he was, and where he was.

That reminder that one he had deemed his only true equal, beyond even his brother, had limits and sharp ones, and still worse that a being of the lineage of the Malebolge had found them in ways that poor deluded Roderick Burgess had never remotely dreamed of, had found them and wielded them with an iron force that had laid her low though Death herself did not yet perceive just how low, had them made him more cautious than usual.

Odin remained silent, even as the hulking thing on his left raised a hammer and stormclouds began to gather on what had otherwise been a clear day.

_We do not have to fight, King of the Aesir._

_My dear Morningstar, spare me the attempts at deception. What you seek and what it is that I seek cannot be so neatly matched. Of all the Endless she was held to be beyond limit or constriction or chain. In her presence I can bind my world in eternity and stave off Ragnarok, and stay the sword of dread Surtr that would burn the worlds in flame. I can grant to Idunna relief from the burden of her apples that sustain us, and from her will find greater armies of Einherjar._

_You? You seek to humble one who humbled you by entering your own realm, as though any would be barred to her. The universe that you have made has her, and all her kin, and there too she shall be last to endure and outlive you. Childish pride on the one hand, the survival of Nine Realms on the other._

The lightning called to Mjolnir and it to the lightning and in that power, absent the thunder as yet, there was an eerie witch-light that illuminated them both.

Mazikeen drew her own blade, one forged in the Seventh Circle, honed by the fires there and all that worked therein.

_In an act of lust and folly she yielded to weakness, and has shown that even the great can fall. My fate is to end up in the belly of a son of the Skywalker. If not for the honor of the thing I'd rather endure for all time on Sklidjiaf and the wisdom of Men in Middle-Earth endure unchanged._

Lucifer's eyes narrowed.

 _King of Asgard might you be but there are only a few entities in Existence who are my equal. And none of them are deities of any other pantheon._

With that Lucifer strode calmly, as did Odin, while Thor's lightning blazed as Mazikeen's wings erupted in great bat-winged shape as she lifted herself over the bolt, aiming her sword at the face of Thor, only for Thor Odinson to grasp it in one of his great hands and smile. 

**You're too pretty to fight me, girl. I fight Jotnar, the primordial embodiments of the savage elements, for sport.**

Lightning arced out and hurled her back, her sword tossed from her.

**You're too pretty, and you fight with refinement against that which cannot be fought. I am son of the High One and of Jord, of the very soil of the Earth. Mine the power of lightning that brings forth the crop of the field!**

She raised herself to her feet, smoking from that lightning-bolt, her glamour shattered and her face revealed, a deep and guttural snarl echoing from her mouth.

 **Now that's more like it,** laughed Thor, as she called her sword to her hand and it flashed with hellfire and the fires of Hell warred with the thunder, buildings shattered with the impact and the combatants heedless.

Lucifer called to himself his own sword, and found to his displeasure that one of Odin's knives could easily block it, the runes worked in full power.

_Nine days did I hang from the World-Tree, an offering of myself to myself. In that time, I gained not merely the runes of my kindred and of my folk, Son of Yahweh, abdicated King of Hell, but of all others, too. I need no shield, for I am Father of Victory, and in my runes there is shielding....._

And then with a sudden speed the other dagger lanced out and Lucifer raised his arm on instinct, calling to himself his full power and blinked when his blood flowed where it hit.

_And a blade to cut as no blade further cuts. I am Gore-God and I am Roarer. I retain the burden of my throne though I go wandering from it. For spite you surrendered yours and you were not even the architect of the demise that you sought in so doing. She was. Hippolyta Hall, daughter of the Queen of Themyscira, blood-sister to she who calls herself Diana, though her people be of Hellenic descent. A mere child of an Amazon, a mortal, better at vengeance than he who wielded one of the most worthy realms of the infinite Planes._

With his left arm bleeding Lucifer found himself working his full strength to ward power with his right, his sword blocking both of the blades, and deciding that his wariness had been fully earned. Were he to have had another day he believed Odin would have been an annoyance dispelled and yet even as they dueled, devastation warped outward.

None marked that the skies suddenly turned black for a moment, nor the shrieking bird of raven-like shape illuminated with glowing white lightning that blocked the Sun and cast an eclipse of a few seconds over Jump City.

It was when the bird transformed into a being short by their standards with skin of greyish hue and eyes of violet, who spoke a single word that against Immortals served as a warning, that they paused. And it was when a being called from Titans Tower before any, including her own brothers, could react appeared that they froze.

Death of the Endless stood, her eyes glowing slightly, the power that bound her in full work, and at her left stood Raven, daughter of Darkness, Pride of the Children of Trigon, in one sense the Horsewoman of Conquest on the White Horse. With her stood another, a being who seemed at one remove a woman whose pain aged an ageless face and at another a being clad in a great hood with a sword on a pale horse that gleamed with a greyish-green hue, the entrails visible within it and the rib cage flexing with its breath.

 _ **Enough!** _Raven's voice was not that of Raven, daughter of Arella Roth, nor quite that of Pride, scion of the lineage of Trigon. The power there froze them in suspended motion, Thor's lightning caught in mid-arc toward the blade of Mazikeen.

**_You are devastating a city that i protect. Suspend your folly, now, or I shall unleash her and even in her folly she is beyond all of you, if I should wield her as a weapon._ **

At that, the lightning of Thor vanished as if it had never been and the clouds vanished as sunlight gleamed the more brightly, while the Allfather and the Morningstar stood with his blade wedged firmly into the Morningstar's shoulder on the same arm that bled and his sword erupting with sparks of energy to match that of the other blade in Odin's right hand. The prospect of facing the thing that they had all feared most made real, as Raven's body gleamed with the witch-lights of Trigon's gem and Death groaned as she raised her hand and removed her glove meant that the fight was parted.

:LUX BAR:

In retrospect, Morningstar, I think I will consider your words and their wisdom. I had thought that the daughter of Trigon would not grasp what it was that she has. She has.

_She is no fool, King of Asgard, she never was. She undid her father's claim on the Earth so strongly that only tiny embers of his presence remain, for all time. To undo a being who is equal in power to the Spectre is a being not to be dismissed._

The Morningstar paused. Then smiled roguishly.

_If we are not to be foes, then perhaps I shall let your silver tongue speak, Grimnir._

Odin paused for a moment, then took a stiff draught of mead from his drinking horn.

_Your brother is here, Morningstar. But I will caution you this. I have considered your words and their wisdom, and I have rejected the offers you wish. Until now, I have had no hope to truly forestall Ragnarok, and now I do. And nothing, not even your brother and you together, shall gainsay me._

With that he vanished, and Thor with him.

Mazikeen groaned as she reached for the mask and placed it back over her face, shuddering at the shame of being seen with the blemish that Delirium of the Endless had given her.

Lucifer strode to her and placed the glamour back with a gentle caress, then groaned. The wounds within him burned, like venom and yet.....

Mazikeen looked.

_Clever fool The One Eyed King be. He never intended you slain, as you surmised, my love. Only out of his way for long enough that he act._

Lucifer's eyes narrowed.

 _I refuse to grant him that. As if it wasn't enough that he goaded me with his Wild Hunt, now this? No._

The light in his eyes became brilliant and in that light and in his presence the Morningstar sent the weight of his Being beyond the stars, a light so brilliantly powerful that the entire gathered group of Lanterns who had just reached the surface of the Earth heard their rings chiming with warnings of a foe who could not be fought, and a brilliant flash of light like a Sun lit anew shone.

As Michael Demurgios looked to his east, he saw his brother's light and his eyes narrowed further as Trigon, held above him by one hand, thrashed.

_After I finish this I have words to have with my brother._

\-------------

TITAN'S TOWER: 

The Titans and the Justice League had seen the thunderstorms gather and felt the kind of forces at work, even those absent mystical senses and guides to what was and was not occurring beyond them. When Raven's soul-self had appeared on a scale to blot the Sun, empowered by the proximity of her Nexus and that boost given to her by one of the intertwined elements she had grasped more fully within the nexus in turn, they had started. Death had vanished in a flash of black energy with white lightning crackling around it, and Ruskoff, who had begun with the standard threat to rend their souls and to feed them to the belly of the maw of the Malebolge, had frozen in turn, shocked and even awed at the sudden and casual demonstration of sister Conquest's power.

Then Raven and Death returned with the power dispelled and the thunderclouds parted.

_I am here, brothers. What brings you here?_

Ruskoff's grin was savage.

_Two things, dear sister. One, the greater to us personally, is the decision of who rules our plane. Too long has the Malebolge wallowed in weakness in the wake of the passing of our father. We would give it strength anew._

_The second....is from her brother._

Death's eyes widened. Destiny of the Endless has given us a warning, imprinted on our minds, and it is one that you cannot dismiss.

With that he pointed to the Tower.

 _It is not one that can be given without, for Destiny's power stops my speech. Within your Tower must it be given, for such his his decree, and alone among entitles that exist until the doors of the Universe are closed and She_ -his finger pointed to Death, whose gaze remained genuinely shocked, an eye twitching slightly- _is last of all things that are, that were, and that are yet to come forth in their fullness and their own decay alike, is his writ the stronger._

And with that his eyes shone not with the hue of Trigon but the gleaming light of Destiny of the Endless, a power greater than his that enshrouded his forms and all of them in a single flash of light that moved faster than thought.

Within the Tower, each of the heroes gathered, taking various positions, and Death lowered herself to Raven's side with a visible wince of pain and a whimper that followed it.

Of all of them who were gathered before the Sons of Trigon, only she recognized the voice that spoke from them in chorus. Her wounded wing trembled and she felt a sense of weakness, and beyond that shame. Shame that she, who was strongest in active force of the Endless had fallen so far that Destiny himself had to intervene, and it was then that she recognized the nature of a warning he had given her long before time.


	11. The Voice of Destiny and a Reunion of Brothers:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A warning given, a garden visited, a brotherly reunion, a feather that binds and cuts.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

Destiny's warning was for a surprising change not cryptic to Death, by her standard of her interactions, such as they were, with her eldest brother. Her eyes widened. 

_Nine days have you to choose, or all existence shall unravel and she shall be last of all things, the universe a gutted waste, and she left to die in slow motion for all that shall follow and nothing shall ever be again. Nine days, as the stars become frozen in light-that-is-ice, as the function of the eldest sister of my family breaks down anew. To her is it given to repair what was lost, for what was lost is within heart and mind._

_The daughter of Trigon is it given to aid her in that repair, for hers the hands that dealt the wounds, but hers not the ones that sustain them. Nine days, children of Earth. Once more your sphere has ensnared one of the Endless in the follies of your people and of your hubris, of your magic and of your demons. The King of Asgard sees a chance that is there to deny harsh fate and the decrees that lurk therein. He is first, but he shall not remain so, and each day of the nine that passes more shall come, until your sphere crack under its strain. The daughter of Tamaran merely compounded other follies, and acted in ignorance. Were my younger siblings to dictate things this would not be sufficient to forestall what will be against you and your kin, O Family of Titans. In another world and in another time I beheld you when the daughter of Trigon fell facing her Father's Terror* and in that world you proved wiser and greater than what I had anticipated even as I knew such anticipation would be. Yours is a name taken foolishly but here, if you act with wisdom, it shall be earned. There are now four of me in my garden, for a moment hinges at which my Book offers no clear answer, and in such moments I have luxury to choose._

Then the monotone suddenly and abruptly changed and it spoke with a menace more fearsome than the Lord Shaper in his form as King of Nightmare, or Death herself in her own wrath:

_I have buried two of my siblings before their time, and in that time my book condemned me to observe. I will **not do so a third time, so act wisely or I shall act for you and in that, there shall be great misfortunes that shall be as tears unnumbered.**_

With that the Sons of Trigon looked around disoriented, and as they prepared to speak the energy of Destiny of the Endless wreathed them in the light that was his own and they found themselves in a maze that at one level was small enough that only a few could cross and yet they knew, instinctively, that it was infinitely wide and that the statues therein told all that would be beyond the end of all things.

Four beings stood, eyes invisible beneath hoods and a book chained to their wrist, and they all four turned to them at the same time.

_You have done as I have requested, and the message shall be given. Upon the actions of the Gem and the King of Asgard, and the Sons of Yahweh hinge one scale, upon the will and the wit of my sister to overcome despair of her own making and shackles of her own shame that she need not feel hinge the other. I suspect, if she should fully grasp this, and that if brother Dream does....._

Destiny was musing to himselves, the Sons of Trigon looking around them.

_If that action they undertake occurs as needs must, your sphere of Hell will emerge a kingdom anew, with the power of my family extended in gratitude. Should it end otherwise, here you shall endure and not be punished for acting in the writ of the Book and of its forking paths. Dream would not care for your fates, Desire would find it a pleasure to goad you. Destruction has abandoned his post, Despair would have you wailing and feasted upon by rats and tearing yourself with hooks. Delirium....would have you fearful of being words on a page, written in homage to a medium of panels inked, texted, and brightly colored and driven mad by that understanding._

_For now, remain my gardens, Sons of Trigon._

They nodded and decided to wander in the maze, not that they had a true choice in the matter. What they saw they could but dimly perceive as through a mirror befogged and marred by a glare of reflected sunlight, for where the realm of Dream is ancient and weighted with the power of Story and of Song, and that of Death but fetters placed upon those who place them, the realm of Destiny is infinite and in its power there is that which is most ancient and understood to the Greek as the Fates, to the Norse as the Norns, to the Christian and the Muslim as Predestination. A power greater than any they could comprehend, and while at one level hope for their plane rose within them, so too did wrath at being bandied about as mere errand boys, and they sought to turn to burn the maze, yet no matter how great the fires they called forth, the maze did not burn, nor did it register their presence.

They would have seen it as a dream yet this was not the Dreaming, and it was in awareness, at last, of power greater than theirs though turned far less to active strife, that had them silenced and humbled.

TITANS TOWER:

While the teams stared at each other for a moment of indecision, Death's ears rang with the phrase she'd hope never to hear again. The stars, the stars. She remembered that time in the long distant age when she had left her function behind and sought to be another. The realm of crimson skies she had gone to and the counsel therein, the freedom to take whatever shapes she wishes, and that which she had done as she had done so. Freedom, she had thought this, but within its confines she had nearly destroyed everything. The knowledge that this was happening again, that she had done this, somehow, yet again, meant that she moved with a speed that the sharp knives that ripped into her person from that motion could not stop.

Back, once more, to the warded feather, and this time, Death vowed, she would act as one of the Endless, and overcome the obstacles placed in her way.

THE GARDEN OF DESTINY:

For a moment from four Destinies of the Endless there was one, and his eyeless face roved across the page and a single sad sigh asserted itself, even as that moment would pass and from four Destinies there were now sixteen.

TITANS TOWER:

Her eyes shone with the fullness of her power and Death was no longer in a form that a human would or could recognize, a being of angles sharp and jagged as mountains and yet curving where there should have been straightness and straight where it should have been spherical. A great entity of darkness illuminated by whorling lights with a hand that was the only vaguely human trait about herself, she seemed to tower beyond the planet Earth to a point that not merely the skies over Jump City but all the Earth was darkened, stars visible in her wake, and birds and nocturnal beasts seemingly awakened as night fell without hesitation. And yet within the room she was roughly human sized, and with a gritted determination to her, her aching wing burning with flame that only spurred her on, she formed a fist and hurled it straight at the wards with intent to shatter them.

It was fortunate for the Earth this time that the Green Lanterns were present and that their Green light of Willpower was able to forestall the catastrophe, for had they not been, the impact of the collision of the full might of Death with the wards set, and the means that sustained them, would have more than halted the Earth mid-rotation and thereby marked its end in a single sudden halt within the courses of time, it would have given the Earth the fate of Krypton, vanished into a field of rubble and a civilization winked out without a trace save in perhaps the Kryptonians themselves, survivors twice over of a doomed world. The impact tore Titans Tower in half, the Titans and the Justice League carried along with it at first, those who could fly grabbing those who could not, Ravens' room, midway in the tower, furthest south of all the rooms used by the Titans, now exposed in open air.

Every piece of furniture in the room was shattered, and Death hurled against a window and through it, her fuller and truer shape than that seen by humans vanished, falling headlong with her flight feathers of her wounded wing fully shorn off, hurled unconscious like a stone, yet it was Raven who caught her, looking with a sense of guilt, and of worry. From a portal at her side she summoned what had remained within her nexus as fresh as the day it had splattered, and with a conscious focus she applied it to the damaged feathers, those at the edge where the very flesh of Death itself had seemed to start to decay and rot, and those where her blood dripped freely.

To her surprise, and relief, what she had suspected and had but grasped in time just sufficient to try to place a halt on things proved true. The blood shorn and tied to her nexus had power sufficient to freeze the damage where it was, though not fully to heal it.

Death looked haggard, thinner, lines carved more deeply on her face, and she curled into Raven with a sense of exhaustion and weariness.

THE REALM OF DESPAIR OF THE ENDLESS:

Stoic and tearing at herself with her hooks, gnawed by her rats, Despair of the the Endless paused. Her pictures seldom displayed a single face this much unless one of her siblings had given themselves very deeply into her realm, though she had seen Destiny when her brother had died, and yielded to the choices Destiny had hoped he would not make. When Delight had become Delirium for a moment the change in her sibling had brought her there. Now.......her eyes went very wide. Not all of the portraits were of her elder sister, but just over half of them were. A number that bypassed her understanding of her own realm, and for a moment she stood, and went to one of the portraits.

Though she knew at one level Death could not feel her sister's presence, she caressed the cheek of the portrait and ripped at herself more viciously.

She was Despair, she could not feel anger in the sense of mortals, and was more bound to her function than her twin was, though less so than Destruction was to his, and Delirium to hers. That feeling she could feel closest to it, she did feel as she caressed the cheek.

She murmured to herself soft words of the kind spoken only to the family of Time and Night, and remained tearing herself with vigor until the portraits changed.

TITANS TOWER:

It did not take much for Titans Tower to restore itself when Zatanna Zatara and Superman were there, given the power of the metal to heal itself, and to restore itself. The Titans, even Starfire, gave Death and Raven space, though a sense of worry, guilt, and unconstrained fear pervaded Starfire, Raven had not been the only one to deal the harm to the Endless in question of the team, she had done so, too. Whatever strange entity had spoken from the voices of Raven's.....family.....might promise one thing when Death was weak, but what it would it do if she became strong again?

The tension spoke heavily in her and she breathed erratically, floating upward, until Conner came to her and offered to spar, and she gladly took him up on it. In the training taught to her by the Warlords of Okaara she could forget, for a time, other worries and fall into a kind of meditative state. And against even a half-Kryptonian her power received a workout that none else save the unwelcome and unwanted presence of the being Mongul and his family could match.

In Raven's room, Death remained curled up on Raven's bed, the despair that had grasped her replaced with a deep emptiness and shame redoubled from the encounter with her brother.

She had vowed she would never repeat the mistake she'd made when she'd left her function. Now, somehow, a mortal, even so powerful a mortal as the only daughter of Trigon of the Malebolge had hurt her in a way nothing else had ever done before. She had seen it a curiosity that Dream had let himself be hurt by the way he interacted with Mortals and how he treated them. She did not despair, nor feel sorrow, for she was emotionally too burnt out for that. Death still cried, her undamaged wing wrapped around herself, her damaged one incapable of being closer to her, rot frozen in motion at the edge.

Raven remained by her and sent empathy trying to help keep her calm, and letting her endure what had happened. And yet......the sheer ease with which she had summoned her like a sorcerer a familiar, with which she who was bounded by no laws and no restrictions had been a thrall with glowing eyes who would have done quite literally anything demanded, spoke to her in a cruel sense of the very marring of her soul and of her soul's presence.

Finally, the hollowness passed enough that she was willing to dry her eyes and look at Raven.

 _ **I know how this happened to you. And.......if I can help fix another time I've brought the universe to the brink of annihilation-and there an acid bitterness and sorrow that was both Pride and Raven together, tears of hellish gleam at her eyes and a sense of failure that hang over her emotions that was palpable, strong, like a great fist to the face for Death and more besides-if I can prevent it, I will. I did something far more foolish than a simple attempt to bind one of you, and I have called up a force far greater than anything I can control alone**_.

Her hand moved along the bare skin of Death's back, moving in soothing circles.

**_You have not done anything wrong, Death, it is your mind and your heart that try to tell you otherwise. Even so great a force as you is allowed to have weaknesses, moments of being a person as well as a concept. My own function entrapped me as well, and I have laid a great prize that those with the power and the greed, and if not possessing the former, the greed and the will to try to grasp it, will continue to take until it is altered._ **

Death stared at her, her stare somewhat detached.

_**We made this mess together, because you wanted to be a person and not a concept, and because I wanted to cut loose and did so heedless of the very real power within me and its tendency to burn not only the endless and the guilty alike, and because in the throes of things that are emotional and uncontrolled by definition, we made mistakes, according to who we are, and to what we are.** _

The voice now was not that of Raven but Pride, and what had been grey was red, and what was purple was white.

_**I wanted to show my mortal half, the Rachel Roth of Gotham City, that she could trust me not to harm someone.** _

A bitter and sad laugh rumbled with tectonic power.

_**And what have I done instead?** _

Her hand waved.

_**You, hurt, the Morningstar and the Demurgios, too, I suspect, together here for their own reasons. Odin, here for his own reasons, whatever they be. Nine days until existence itself unravels and you are stuck in something terrible that will never end.** _

The bitter tectonic rumbled echoed a second time.

_**We can't alter that we did make the mistake. We'll just pick ourselves up, fix it-and here she gently placed her hands on Death's side and slowly and delicately, waiting until Death gave her a tiny nod, raised her up so that their eyes met-and in that fixing, I'll take whatever the universe gives me for hurting you. You placed a great trust in me, and I wounded it, and in that wound, I have endangered all existence, for one cannot neatly harm she who embodies life and death alike without a very great price paid. Rachel Roth also trusted the Daughter of Darkness, and I hurt her, too, but where I am Pride, I know when I face forces greater than I.** _

Death's eyes remained glassy.

Then Pride moved away from her and strode, not shuffling but confident strides and pointed to the wards.

_**On these feathers I put that your own essence would become to you what it is to all other things. That you live, here, as you do, is a proof that you are far greater than I could have imagined. No force of my own making could do this to you absent that. Each time you have pushed to try to break the wards, you have unleashed within yourself your own power to end all things and to mark a transition. You....** _

She sighed.

_**I anticipated that at most it would throw you out the window. I believed it impossible for a mortal, even with the blood of an Endless congealed into something I cannot move on my own, to actually hurt one of you.** _

_**The words "I'm sorry" are nowhere near enough for this, but I will say them all the same. I'm sorry, Death.** _

Death looked at her, though her gaze was still empty.

_**I am, too. I asked the wrong things of myself, and of you. I......I think I tried to fix an issue that can't be fixed in ten of your mortal lifespans, even if that is a minuscule time to an Endless, the wrong way. I put too much into this, in a way that I should not have done, and I have refused to admit to myself that in this sense, I really did not do anything wrong, save that that mortals do and have done all the time. In the past so many people looked at me with hate and shame and fear about things like this, especially if it led them to kill themselves, like I was to blame. I did not understand that then. Now I do.** _

Her legs were pulled together and her healthy wing wrapped around them.

_**Can I tell you a story, Raven?** _

Pride blinked, and nodded.

_**A long time ago, long, long before your world was born, mortals hated me. They took to dying as they do all new things, with enthusiasm. These were mortals of the Dawn-Time, before even the fall of the Morningstar and his companions. Beings that defy understanding, and even their pantheons that were born and died before time in its courses began. They came to hate me, and a being that called itself Trigon sought to bind me, much as you've done, and to make me bear him a Daughter of Darkness, a keystone in any scheme he would have had to dominate the universe.** _

Pride froze, her eyes very wide.

 _ **I dispersed his essence into shattered malice, but then that memory, and the horror of what had nearly occurred, overwhelmed me and I threw my sigil aside, I shattered the portraits of my family, and I fled to a far-distant land, a land of crimson skies. A vast mountain floating beyond all time and space, and all other corners of this multiverse**_.

Pride blinked again. **_Azarath_** , she mused to herself.

_**Yes, Azarath, Death said, nodding. There, I spent time as myself, freed of the burden of my job. I explored my shapes, I let myself experiment with what I could be much as brother Destruction does nowadays. But without, the universe shattered. I made monsters, Perpetua, Nekron, the Life Entity, I unleashed others by giving them ingress, the entities of the emotions that co-exist with or brawl with willpower. Stars could not die, but absent entropy, which is a product of my power meeting my brother's, even if he should lay down his sigil, they froze, their light becoming as ice. And it unraveled further from there, a thing horrible beyond reckoning. Trigon returned to life, then, empowered as he was at the dawn and he sought me, and he could not find me.** _

_**He found my sigil when the being that did find me, Krona of Oa, was seeking for it likewise. A terrible battle was fought with my brother aiding Krona and your father was weakened again, but they would only find me later, and then I looked out from Azarath and saw what they told me was truth. I retook the Sigil, and everything became as it was, your father's essence dispersed again, save that the monsters I made endured.** _

_**So when you came along, the Daughter of Darkness I was meant to be the original mother thereof, I thought I could heal old wounds, the loneliness of never having people who saw me for me, and the memory of the old attempt to....to hurt me...that your father did. I wanted revenge on him, to have fucked the daughter that was meant to be mine, at one level. I also wanted, if I lost my virginity, to exorcise quite literal demons with you and with your presence, and to make all of this better by knowing that you could take me in a way I would truly feel. To be a woman, not just a concept that acts like a person and mostly succeeds. But I placed too much emphasis on the wrong ways to deal with this, and I did this even when Dream and even Desire warned me. Little love does Desire have for me, and xie warned me all the same.** _

Death rubbed her upper arms and shivered, more tears falling down her cheeks.

**_Now my right wing is broken and I can't do my job, I need my wings to help stabilize that energy I produce. I haven't even left my job, it's just.....I'm broken, I can't do the thing I'm made to do and once I would have cheered and loved it most of anything. Now I've lost something that I'm the last of my family to lose-Pride raised an eyebrow.-Yes, even Destiny has had a lover or two. Lost it, and I've done nothing since but feel like I tainted myself, and adding that to what you told me...._ **

Death held her head in her hands and rocked herself for a moment, her damaged wing spasming.

Then she sighed, low and level.

_**As you said, we can't change the past. You're sorry you hurt me and while I'm sorry doesn't cover everything on my side, either, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you the full truth.** _

Pride looked at her, jaw gaping.

_**I think if I had none of this would have happened that way. You would have either refused me or at least found another trophy to take.** _

Her smile became cryptic. _**I think my belt would have sufficed, and in the hands of a mortal it would be far more than a belt, and I would have had to summon and build a new one to fill that part of my identity and my power and the rest. Because I told an impartial truth, my function escaped control, and so did yours. And now this.** _

She stood, Raven's arm around her shoulder, and walked slowly and painfully to the feathers, all of them now behind the ward where none could get to them save Raven herself.

_**Odin and Lucifer fighting in your city because of me is several bridges too far, and I won't let that continue. They won't quit until the feathers are back, and I'm restored to what I was. And that can't happen as long as we dance around emotions and bury them in more pleasurable activities that don't address or deal with the real problem. I yelled at Dream for that kind of idiocy when he did it. I need to be better when I do it. Not least for myself, and you too.** _

She looked at the feathers, emotions hollow.

Then both looked outside.

**_It's nighttime now, and nothing's happened since. Can....can i sleep with you? And I don't mean sex, I mean just sleeping-the last sentence accompanied by a stammer and her moving her free arm in a slightly jerking fashion._ **

Raven nodded. _Sure,_ and it was her voice, not Pride's, that answered.

That night they slept in the same bed, Death's broken wing high up, the feathers beneath the clipping brushing the ceiling with a light whisper that threaded through dreams.

Around them, the Justice League and the Titans had tried some strategies to consider things, but the realities mentioned to them by Zatanna, of the entities that had fought there and that one of them was no less than Thor of Asgard, and with him Odin, an old foe of Themyscira and a being of power little less than the Archangels, matched only by the likes of Highfather or Darkseid. The other was Lucifer Morningstar himself, a being that could no more be fought than a force of nature.....those had brought quiet and worry. Worry that was not dispelled the next morning when John Constantine knocked on the front door of Titans Tower, accompanied by a being all too familiar on the left, Zauriel, whose light was less brilliant than usual 'merely' at floodlight level, and a very tall blond man with long hair that flowed past his shoulders, in a snazzy white business suit. 

With them was an unconscious man with his mask left in burnt rubble around him, bound by a chain of heavenly make, and taken with a stunned yet gleeful attitude by Nightwing into the Titans Tower prison.

"Zauriel, and....."

The being on the right spoke, his face calm and his voice flowing down like rain with a power continuous and inexorable. I am Michael Demurgios, twin brother of the Morningstar. I am here on behalf of She who you call the Presence.

Silence greeted this in a stupefied wonder, the teams looking at each other.

_Do not worry about my brother, I will handle him, and what he seeks to do. For now, you have task enough to unravel a force in your tower at its halfway point that risks the annihilation of your multiverse._

Michael's smile became a cold, perfect mirror to Lucifer's, and in the future when the two stood side by side the degree to which their facial expressions duplicated each other perfectly became an uncanny marker that left others chilled to see it.

_My brother and I,on paper, can create another, and yet if that force unravels it, is so by the power that will take the Presence and us as well._

The cold smile became more genuine, almost childish in its enthusiasm (and this too would be mirrored by Lucifer in time to come). _It is a genuine pleasure to have a truer freedom of action than usual. So, as I have said, Michael Demurgios at your service._

A few minutes later the elevator dinged and Raven, Daughter of Darkness, stepped out with a haggard Death who needed her to help her walk, and she froze with a genuine fright on seeing the Archangel Michael and Zauriel in Titans Tower.

Michael's smile became a bit colder and more cynical. _Do not be afraid. You have done well to diffuse the tension growing here. Now you are not doing so alone. I presume the Eldest of the Endless gave his message?_

The teams nodded.

_Then we have eight days, so let's not tarry._

With that, Michael stepped out of the tower and his wings burst into brilliant light as he flew upward, seeking the presence of his brother.

ODIN'S BASE, JUMP CITY:

Odin and Thor had remained quiet in that time, Odin developing a few new weapons marked with Enochian, Thor's lightning charging them with newer power relative to that which had gone before. 

Odin blinked, his one eye focusing on the T-shaped tower.

_Freedom, my son, from Fate in a way that we have not imagined. Part of me says that this cannot work, that Ragnarok is a fixed point in time. Yet the rest of me, whether that be true or not, intends to thoroughly enjoy this. The Morningstar is arrogant, humbling him, and even his brother together? They shall not tread with such ill-caution come the next Wild Hunt._

His hands looked at the new weapons, and at the slight modifications made to Mjolnir, the Enochian runes placed upon it with a Seidr-incantation that they would fade when their task was done. Gungnir, modified with both Enochian runes and a set of Seidr-work combined with runes that enhanced its power, audibly thrummed and gleamed with a menace that made Thor smile with a blend of excitement and a bit of malice, for such was the power of the presence of the Gore-God that his very focus whetted appetite for combat and for slaughter.

Then his gaze turned to their left, as Thor's followed him, where another figure materialized, one whose presence was Earthier in multiple senses of the word yet every bit as mystically charged as Odin's own. Of the Earth and of trees and crops a wistful smell and psychic impression greeted them. Yet a reek of sex and blood and other more primordial things did as well. On her back she held a spear of the make of her people, around her neck gleamed a brilliant golden necklace adorned by a jewel more beautiful than anything else that ever was or would ever be, a jewel made by the smiths of Nidavellir, the Svartalfar.

Her gaze, stoic and yet haughty, met the one-eyed king's.

 **Allfather** , her voice creaked with the ancientness of trees and echoed with the wind and the rushing waters of rivers and of waterfalls.

 _Freyja Vanadis_ , Odin said, his voice calm.

 **I have seen a prospect in the Well of Urd that Ragnarok can be halted, perhaps, or averted**.

**That is correct, yes.**

Freyja's gaze turned toward him.

**If that were so it might lead you to incline against the peace with our people were you to gain this on your own. In that sense, on behalf of Vanaheim, I have come to aid you, as well as one of the Aesir, as an envoy of the peace.**

Odin's smile was unkind, but it was the only kind of smile the Allfather welcomed at one level, and Freyja knew this.

_Welcome, then, to the cause._


	12. Brotherly Reunions and a Wall breaks:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael and Lucifer have a very unexpected reunion that goes better than either has reason to expect, Odin and Freyja intensify their plans, and the Source Wall begins to crack under the strains of the multiverse unraveling.

LUX BAR:

When the knock came, Lucifer froze, in surprise. He knew that knock.

Mazikeen in turn looked up and her gaze was the same mixture of both amazement and bemusement as his.

_ What does he want?  _

Lucifer blinked, taking a deep breath. He winced. Odin, that bastard, had hurt him. All things considered....he got up and moved stiffly, as the knock repeated itself. 

The door opened and he looked, at a face identical to his own save that the hair was a lighter shade of blond and extended past his shoulders.

_Michael._

**Lucifer.**

Lucifer winced again as a sharp spike of pain surged through him.

_Well, come in why don't you?_

With that Michael strode in, looking around the bar.

**Not the same as the one I died in.**

_Well no, brother. It's not. And it wouldn't be._

Lucifer looked around, and was surprised that Michael was so nonchalant about everything in this place given the....prior associations.

Michael whirled around and looked much more closely at the bandaged, yet still bleeding wounds.

**How?**

_Odin,_ Lucifer snarled _. Bastard knows about the feather, he thinks it can prevent Ragnarok. Problem is that he's right, and if he can do that, he won't stop until he does or some greater force overrules him._

**Where is Dream of the Endless in this?**

Lucifer shrugged, wincing again.

_Dear brother, Death is that entity who is only weaker than the Presence, the two of us together, and her brother Destiny._

Michael snorted.

**He'll outlive us for a time, poor unlucky bastard.**

Lucifer shrugged, wincing again.

_That's the problem there. In a truthful sense there is only the two of us and Her that can tell her where to head in. Destiny could, if he ever put the damned book down and acted, but what are the odds there? He's seen one sibling murdered, another....transformed....and yet another committed suicide and what's he done about it? Read things like a damned voyeur._

Michael nodded, conceding the point.

**There's a worse problem, my brother. If you and I do not act together on this, and that does mean facing Odin and Freyja-**

Lucifer blinked, then cursed in a string of profanity that left the air blue before him as Michael cocked his head and then snorted audibly.

_Frejya? Both of them?_

**Yes, brother.**

_Well fuck me, then. If I'dve know that I wouldn't ha-_

**Oh spare _me._ You would have. It's in your nature. You've wanted _her_ humbled since she appeared in your own universe and performed her _function_ in person even when you have restricted the other Endless to mere _functions_ and nothing....direct.**

Lucifer nodded, conceding the point.

 **You would not have done it this way, however, I will grant that in turn**. Michael extended his hand. 

**Take my hand, brother.**

Lucifer's eyes narrowed. _Really? You're going to use that-_ and yet part of him did so and his eyes glowed, as did Michael's. Mazikeen stared in awe and shock as the combined power of both of them meant every single wound dealt Lucifer was unmade as if it had never been.

When the hands moved apart the light vanished and Lucifer breathed, for a moment, shakily.

**Seldom do we get to work as allies. Fighting the Lilim by your side, brother, was a rare pleasure. Here, however, we are not fighting, not once we have faced Odin and Freyja, and probably the Thunderer, too.**

_Oh?_

**If you want her, and all of them, humbled and in your debt, brother, you think too _small_. That has always been your way, ever since you Fell, and since you decided 'better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heav'n. Heal the broken wing, working with the daughter of Trigon, and _she_ will never be able to forget that at one point in time the life of Death is owed to the Morningstar.**

_And to you._

**Oh, I would have nothing to gain from her, nor desire to do so.**

Michael clicked his teeth.

**Father did not give me, or those angels loyal to him, capacity to remain so and to be the kind who would. Not so much you, and however much I deplore this, She demanded that I act, and so I have, and so I will.**

Lucifer nodded.

_Together, then._

Michael nodded in turn.

**Together, there is almost nothing that can stop us.**

Then as Lucifer looked at the table for a moment in awkwardness, Michael continued. **Unfortunately almost is a category simultaneously too broad and too narrow. And I suspect that between them the Allfather and the Mistress of Folkvangr would find that almost and find a means to threaten even us together. Were you to face them alone....**

Lucifer sighed. _I hate being dependent on others._

And now, to add to his anger, Michael was almost insufferably smug and it wasn't just that state of being aware he was imagining it and yet being unable to hear it. I know. And yet....

Lucifer gave him a dirty look.

_Very well. So do we act now or?_

**No. If we do so, we risk too much. Things are at a fine balance, brother. The stars are freezing, and reality is unraveling.**

And then Lucifer and Michael's eyes alike turned to the great Wall that marked the lines of time and space, almost like a fourth wall that left them feeling at times very flat and marked in primary colors and ink. Like they held omnipotent power, yet bounded within a space of square dimensions or none at all, subject to inscrutable whims of entities beyond even their imagining. Their eyes narrowed. Then widened.

 _Well **fuck** me_, Lucifer murmured. _The Source Wall is **breaking**._

Michael nodded. **Yes.**

Lucifer's nose twitched. _Great. Uxas and company will be showing up sooner than later._

Michael shrugged. **Not here, not with this. After, perhaps. If Yuga Khan breaks free again.**

THE SOURCE WALL:

It was a forbidding concept and a place and a moment in time all at once. It was vast bodies bound and looped together, a great prison and torture chamber. It was not merely a wall but the wall, a place beyond which concepts as fiction and reality hit a metaphysical manifestation at one level, and at another a place that only the Endless could stride among without due risk (and in xir own way, Desire relished that power as the most vivid demonstration of xir force where Delirium of the Endless in turn simply flitted to and fro and up and down in it. Colossi were bound and fused and tied in a way that nothing, on paper, could break. They were tied there in time and space, and they were always there, and they had never been beyond it.

Only once before had the Wall cracked, when one of the Seven Forces had laid down her position, had thrown her ankh from her realm and it had scythed clean through the Wall, and in the energetic backlash an entity, monstrous and terrible, had form and made her shape and her presence known. In that terrible moment she had placed her stamp on existence, much as the demon Trigon had done. In a sense he both was and wasn't the root of Evil as Darkseid was and became of Tyranny. In her sense she was the root of that specific strain of supernatural powers across time and races known as supervillainy, the impulse that ensured no good could arise without a greater evil.

She considered herself Death's daughter, though she was not, in truth, and she also considered herself the creator of all the spheres of a greater multiverse. Though in truth, she merely lied and had the power and the potential to do so.

Much of the elements of the rebuilt Wall had been built to conceal and to contain her, among the other nasties. Yuga Khan in particular had possessed power sufficient to hold the binds together, and yet.....

The stars were freezing, the absence of Death meaning that entropy and thermodynamics were starting a process not so much of decay, for absent Death there was no decay, as of becoming entrapped in endless time. The stars were freezing....and a crack slowly grew in the Wall, exposing a face. It had a great extension of the forehead that was both head and crown, and the eyes were closed.

Slowly, by degrees, sapience began to return to the sleeping creature.

TITANS TOWER:

A day had lapsed since the incidents with Odin and the Sons of Trigon. Kon-El and Superman were letting off steam flying and patrolling over Jump City, the other heroes were busy conversing and planning. They knew it was beyond futile to face the Morningstar or the Demurgios, even if Zauriel had been so inclined, which as a sensible, sane angel he was nothing of the sort. Zauriel had said very little, and while Starfire in turn was hovering over the Tower, letting the Sun cast its rays, Raven and Death were in her room, as Raven pondered the flight feathers that had fallen with the last attempt of Death to free herself, and Death clung to her umbrella, breathing haggard.

Raven's appearance shifted from moment to moment between the daughter of Arella, the daughter of Trigon, and a being who blended aspects of both, until it was Pride, daughter of Trigon, who held the feathers up to Death.

_I think, if we work together here, we can attach these, at least._

_**How?** _Death's question was quiet, and her gaze focused on the floor.

 _Your power was turned against you because you went against the wards_. Death's bleak stare met her, and had Raven known more of Dream of the Endless then she would have been perturbed at how much the gaunter Death with her weakening frame resembled Morpheus in that moment and that stare. 

_It was turned against you, but I believe between the two of us, we can undo that._

Death's stare remained uncannily like that of Morpheus as her gaze was one of a profound and vulnerable sadness, tears pooling in her eyes and her fists clenching and unclenching.

**_How?_ **

Raven took a deep breath, and it was her voice overlapping with the daughter of Trigon that answered.

_This is as much a product of your refusing to admit that you made a mistake, and so did I. I saw that, in my Nexus. In the way and in the manner that your blood remained there._

She clicked her teeth.

_You must understand, it's not your fucking me in itself that created the problem. Sex is sex, your having it and enjoying it is never the issue. It's the emotions you entrusted to it. Why did you come to me, exactly? Was it merely to enjoy simple mechanical pleasures? Your siblings have had multiple offspring by mortals. Nothing stops you from this, you who are beholden to none of their rules._

Death winced, the truth in that statement cutting more unpleasantly than any weapon would.

She looked at the floor, and at her damaged wing, and then Raven stared in stupefied bemusement as Death broke down into a kind of ugly crying that she had seldom seen from humans. Lack of experience and comprehension of how to help others meant that she just stared there for a moment, before walking slowly and cautiously to her, and placing her arm around her, and sitting there as Death let her emotions free. Death shifted with a speed that was far faster than the Man of Steel and a strength that made the most bone-crushing hug of Starfire's, and her hands were around Raven as she let herself cry until Raven's shoulders felt drenched.

Finally, Death let her go, and slid back.

_**I.......I was lonely.** _

Raven raised an eyebrow.

_**I have spent billions of years in a job that I.....I still cannot bring myself to love enough.** _

Death's laugh was soft and low and bitter.

_**I once threw a loaf of bread at my brother's head when he was down and lost in a mire of his own making. I went up to him and I yelled at him for being the stupidest, most appallingest self-centered excuse for an anthropomorphic personification in this or in any other plan. Almost as bad as our sibling Desire.** _

She sniffled slightly, and then wept again, holding Raven, as the memories of Morpheus intruded in a way that left her incoherent for a time. Understanding the grief in this sense, Raven tolerated it more than she had the first time, her arm wordlessly around Death's shoulder in turn.

_**I did that because he made a mistake. He was proud and he let himself get locked away for seventy years by people who wanted me and thought they could hold me. Only my True Name, the thing you inscribed on that feather that did and has done all of this, could really do it. I was so mad at Dream for letting himself suffer in a fishbowl for seventy years out of pride. He and I talked, and he thought that I came there to give him pride in work and I didn't do that, I didn't want to do that. I wanted him to remember what it is to be family, to be with your siblings and.....** _

She sighed.

**_I was mad at him not least because here, at least, we are most like each other. Prideful, willful. I've made a lot of problems for myself because there are no rules that bind me, nothing that can hurt me It makes me arrogant. And all of that was a thing that just made me brittle even when I thought I'd gotten past it. If I took pride in my work and in becoming the friend mortals needed, it would compensate for billions of years of being seen as less than a piece of dog shit under someone's shoe._ **

Death stared at her hands, removing her gloves, as the moment stretched on.

_**So I thought I'd just exorcise the loneliness, let myself get tamed and fucked, the way Desire talked about doing to mortals. And....there's that issue with your father, too. You know some of it, and well.....he wanted you to be my daughter. I have....something....like a daughter in a faraway portion of existence. Made when my ankh I cast out struck the Source Wall, at the dawn of time, before the fall of the Morningstar.** _

She clicked her teeth.

**_That kind of thing wears on you. The knowledge that the demon Trigon tried to hurt me, to use my true name to do....to do that....that also hurts._ **

_**So I thought, if I go to you, if I let myself know that I humiliated my would-be conqueror, that all that loneliness and all that weight would be exorcised. I could go to you, let it all out, and it would just....go away.** _

Raven and Pride seemed to smile bitterly at once, and their voices echoed in perfect unity.

_Doesn't work that smoothly. Never has for us, and it never really does. You can't solve your problems like this. Sex is just bodies in motion, it's not a solution to all of your problems._

Death sighed.

_**I know that. now. But why do I feel like it....** _

Raven's hand grasped her wrist gently as she pulled her hand to her, kissing her knuckle.

_Why do you feel like it made you tainted? You've spent billions of years defining yourself by a specific role and moment in time, by the idea that you are the only one of your family who has been above....experiences...you have defined on a basis that was already....unhealthy. You yelled at your brother out of love, because you knew the mistakes you were making, tried to stop him from making them, And how did that work out?_

_**It....didn't. Morpheus....he....** _

Raven's hand moved in circles on her shoulder.

_Morpheus's decisions are on him. You didn't cause his death. Your seeking to be.....well, to be fucked by me in the way you did isn't something to be ashamed of. You got what you wanted and-_

_**I.....I violated the law of hospitality. My nails, they.....** _

Raven shut her up with a single finger on her black lips and Death's eyes widened, her gaze fully looking into Raven's four red ones that burned like coal-fires in her grey skin.

_Shhh....you are beyond such laws. Your siblings would have been in a pile of shit of Augean proportions and with no Heracles to divert rivers to' cleanse them if they'd made that mistake. You did not. You were afraid, you were afraid because I was hurt then, and hurt badly. Because you underestimated your strength....and you overestimated mine. I was ashamed, I admit, because I was humbled in front of Koriand'r, and I said hurtful things because of that, and in that sense, I admit my own faults. And I know that whatever magic is at work here cannot be so easily undone as all this._

With that she held up one of the flight feathers.

 _Maybe...._ she mused. _I think I might, with you, have enough power to reattach the feathers on my own, if..... and their eyes met. If we admit our mistakes, and work to heal them and their aftermath._

It was at that moment that Death saw with eyes further than those of Raven to the Source Wall, and her eyes noticed a crack that was growing, and then grew very wide. She saw a head that was both skull and crown, and eyes that were closed. A name was shaped by her lips in stupefied horror, and she turned to Raven.

_**Well, I am more than willing. I am sorry that I placed such burdens on you, and from you, your world. I asked it and you to bear burdens that were more than any one person or would could be truthfully expected to bear, or to have borne. It was a weighty thing and it was too much.** _

Her eyes turned to the feathers.

_Do you really think you can do this on your own?_

She bit her nail, a display of indecision and an expression crossing her face that was a perfect match for that of Delirium in her more quiet moments, and Raven cocked her head uncertain.

Raven answered, cautiously

_You are strong, and I am strong, but the power there....it came from both of us, and I think...._

She sighed.

_It might work if Michael Demurgios and Lucifer could work with us._

She laughed, a bit sorrowfully.

_And what are the odds of that? Oh well, it can't hurt to try._

And with that Death raised her wing, and focused on it, looking at its damaged element, and then took a low sharp breath in stop.

_**The decay....the...the gangrene. It's stopped.** _

Her eyes looked at Raven in wonder.

_**I won't get worse.** _

Then she smiled at her, with a soft, almost fearful expression, one that began to transform slightly into one of hope.

_**Okay, let's try it.** _

With that Raven raised the first of the flight feathers that had fallen most recently, and her power joined to that of Death, energy dark as night and marked by white lightning intersecting with one of a nature that she could not quite imagine, nor comprehend. for it was Finality and Rebirth and a thousand other things. The power surged out and Zatanna and Doctor Fate immediately sensed it and held their breath, and both Raven and Death lent their full measure of power and focus on the feather, and the prospects of it being reattached, and what that could mean.

Death gritted her teeth, then bit her glove to muffle a scream at the feeling of the nerve reconnecting, and that part of her power returning, and a brilliant flash of what was and wasn't light erupted outward from the tower. For a moment it seemed as if a new Sun had risen in the night and where the Sun's rays shone with brilliant light and heat, it seemed as if a second Sun, gentler than the first but redolent with the air and the power of mortality had risen likewise. When the light passed, Death looked in shock.

_**I.....I don't believe it. It worked.** _

One of her feathers was restored to her wing, and she felt that small grasp of regained power with an exultant grin.

As she smiled and stood up, though needing her umbrella still for balance, she failed to notice that Raven had become greyer than usual, the light in her eyes duller, and the purple in her hair lightened in hue, her breath ragged. At least until Raven slumped to the floor, and her head hit the ground with a sickening crack.

Death looked at her and then blinked, facepalming. She made a muffled sound of frustration and then sighed.

_**Well, great.** _

With that she knelt down beside Raven and leaned near to her mouth and breathed slightly, and the light and color returned, as Raven looked at her with weariness.

**_You're not doing more than one of these a day, if that much. We know it can work, now._ **

Death smiled. At least with the ones that were....detached...more recently.

With that, Death's eyes returned to the Source Wall. The crack was growing, and that drew some concern from her, as she bit her lip. Even if she healed fully, would a span of days be sufficient to halt that problem?

And Raven returned to full consciousness to stare in bemusement at a loaf of bread right next to her face and Death's right boot.

ODIN'S BASE: 

Are you sure about this, Allfather?

_Quite so. The Demiurgos would join his brother, if it came to this._

How can we resist them both?

Odin's eye turned to Frejya and his smile was cold.

_Even they, who together are omniscient, bleed against Enochian. The herald of the presence even more than the Fallen, for he knows more of what angelic power can do and is more willing to do it. Their Father taught mortals this speech well before He left them._

Odin's smile became colder.

_So simple a matter for the lord and lady of Runes to wield angelic ones of their Father's own make against the Loyal and the Fallen._

_That feather grants a power to forestall Ragnarok. And...._

He smiled still more coldly.

_At the end of the day, if we do not take it now, I've come to understand something of the magic there, for mine is a knowledge of blood and death matched by few others even among Gods and Goddesses._

With that Odin made a small conjuration and an image of the Feather shown to them from the eyes of Huginn and Muninn. Words were on it, inscribed in a mystic pattern, a number that spoke to him and gave him an extra element and incentive. Nine charms stacked upon the other, one encoded within the other into the form of a great spear. A spell that might have been carved by Pride in a trance, yet it was more than her work, and it was more power than was truthfully native to this world or to this reality, or to any of its attendant elements. And yet, for all that, given time enough the two of them would break it if it were all that were left of the original elements, for Raven of Azarath and Pride of the house of Trigon would never seek to contain

_That is **her** blood, and **her** power. The daughter of Trigon built something too powerful to be reattached to the Endless, from one of her own flight feathers. They have coded a magic here greater than even they can break._

_Then what can?_

_I do not know, but it means that our leaving, if leaving we are forced to do...._

He laughed, a laughter of menace and the creak of gallows from which bodies hanged and the knowledge spoken to him from them echoing in its menace.

_It is but a stay of a problem. I will humble the Morningstar and the Demiurgos, at the very least, I, you, and the Thunderer. And when they are gone, you and I and the rest of us shall return. And they shall not._

His smile was still more unpleasant.

_And on this matter, at least, the Lord Shaper can do nothing, and in that regard....we are fortunate. He is a creature of stories and Story itself, and he forbids himself to intervene even when his own family's fate is on the line._

Freyja blinked.

_So does all of this matter? _

_Oh yes, it matters._

Odin showed her another thing, dark and forbidding, the Wall of Walls.

_That is breaking. That will draw the focus of the great cosmic entities and only distantly that of the Earth, and due to that feather, the mightiest of all the beings besides the Angels is bound here, weak, even if she thinks she can regain the rest._

Odin's grin had been cold and now it carried with it the carrion stench of decay and entrails.

_So we will face them, yes. But I am father of Victory, not merely of strife. My name and my focus has been forgotten, while that of Zeus son of Cronus is known more to mortals, these days._

**The Amazons,** murmured Thor. **Will they not intervene if we return?**

 _Let them ,_ sneered Freyja. _Foolish immortals penned away on an island pining for forgotten days, and the Olympians enmeshed with intrigues there. We are not the simpering ergi children of the South._

She looked at the rune-encrusted blades with the Enochian that glimmered with newer, more deadly runes. Runes powerful enough to bite omnipotence and humble it, and to grant them a cut of spite and mastery that would play to longer and deeper games.

Her eyes met Odin's one.

_You always did play the long game, King of the Aesir._

Odin laughed again.

_I was not given the name Wiser and Wisest for nothing._


	13. A Failure to Communicate:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starfire misreads empathy across her bond with Raven and makes an impulsive set of decisions.

TITANS TOWER, STARFIRE'S ROOM:

Starfire sat on her bed, thinking. Since the news of everything with herself, Raven, and Death had come out, Dick had looked at her strangely. When Death had confirmed that they had been lovers (and Dick knew what those feathers meant more than she or anyone else had reason to suspect, even before the shit hit the fan), Dick had gotten angry with her. He was willing to share her with Raven and to learn how to share someone, but with Death? One of the Seven? He didn't even know where to begin with that, and the blend of anger and insecurity and simple jealousy had reduced him from low but quiet words in a sharp tone to incoherent red-faced gibberish, ending in yet another off-again period beginning. Starfire wasn't entirely sure what to make of that.

She found herself at least slightly insulted on behalf of both Raven and Death that the one who had destroyed the world and casually possessed the power to rewrite reality on a whim if she sought to wield her power at its highest levels....and the one with the sadistic streak that was never fully buried well and which Death had inadvertently goaded that day, was seen as less risky to her, or to all of them, than one of the Endless. The Winged Walker had a fearsome reputation, to be sure. She was seen as the most powerful of the Endless even if she herself did not seem to see or think on those lines. She had come to Raven, and to her, and had submitted to them, and had broken herself, and perhaps, as Starfire reflected broken reality with her. 

To have conquered the being that would be the last trace of all that was and would leave the fallen multiverse for parts and life unknown was a heady thing. And she had a sinking feeling that there was more to that feather than Raven knew, and that the demon, in the end, was still a demon and would have laid elements of a riddel that could not be so neatly unpacked as all that. If one could command the very concept of Life and Death, master a being that if things were to operate on that King of the Mountain basis so many of her fellow heroes liked to believe they did, was the most powerful of the Endless and the only one able to match the duo of the Demiurgos and the Morningstar, at her fuller nature. They were Creation, she was the End of All Things.

She had become the lover of this being and had quite enjoyed it, had made the being surrender to her. And yet.....

Her thoughts returned to the feather with the blood-marked runes. She knew the runes Raven used for her friends, and somehow, perhaps by some strange whim of Pride, even knew the runes Pride would have used for them. And both of hers were o-Her eyes widened and she left her room, went to the elevator, and went to Raven's door. 

Ever since that day in the Nexus her emotions intertwined with Raven at a more powerful level, and that was a wonderful thing. It meant neither of them were truly alone and in the wee small hours of the morning when her past as a slave reached out with gleaming eyes and hands that were in gauntlets that felt like wicked claws, then that meant something to her. And when the memory of brilliant white light and the ripping sensation of that day in the Citadel of Skath came home, then Raven too could reach out and be comforted. Since _she_ had returned, Raven's emotions had gone through one revolving door of rapid change after another. Curiosity, wariness, relief, fear, worry, shame.

The appearance of Odin was.....very concerning. She remembered all too well what it was to face Hyperion, though Raven had only done so once. And those were the Titans, deities simultaneously more esoteric and less viscerally nasty than the Aesir could be but no less warlike. The Morningstar....she had thought that human mythology was fascinating but that her own people, and her own X'Hal being all too real where human gods and goddesses, Olympians excepted, did nothing of the sort meant a few things. Not least among them that if Zeus existed then the Abrahamic entity either did not or was not the entity he said he was. Now there was the Morningstar, a being that had displayed a brief hint of power that both awed her and made her more than a little fearful.

Then she felt Raven's emotional links and otherwise waver and briefly fade out. Dick did too, and he just stared blankly for a moment, almost hypnotized and too dazed by the psychic pain of the moment to function well. Starfire did not have that kind of bond and if she had seen Dick she would have been grateful for it. Starfire's own registered a brief moment of aching emptiness and her eyes gleamed and she _shoved._ After the incident with the mirror, Raven had placed powerful wards on her door that meant that only a few people could even knock on it. Herself, Vic, and Gar. Dick's bond meant the door opened for him the same way that it did for Raven, something that had led to some hilarious moments of awkwardness at points in the past. 

She didn't knock, then, she'd shoved, and then she'd seen Raven on the ground, her head bleeding and her gaze the dulled shock of a concussion, with of all things a loaf of that strange human concoction called bread between her face and Death's boot. She didn't even register that one of Death's feathers had been returned to her, her eyes on her....girlfriend, and yes, that was what they were now even if more of the finer details still had to be worked through. Her anger blazed then and she looked at a Death who unknown to her had saved Raven from what otherwise would have been a swift trip to the Sunless Lands with her breath, and saw someone callous and cruel and snarled:

"Get off her bed."

The words were spoken and Death found herself suddenly moving away from the bed, her body moving against her own will and her own attempts to control it.

Starfire's eyes blinked and she then narrowed them. "Hmm...." she mused.

She wanted to test this, but not to risk something too dangerous, or something that could see the creature in Raven's room turn on her, or against her. What was the phrase that Kryptonian general liked agai......Oh. right.

"Kneel before Koriand'r" she said with a slight quirk to her lip as Raven looked at her with narrowed eyes and a frank 'WTF" expression on her face.

To their mutual surprise Death did kneel, even if her body trembled and her wings pained her.

Starfire's only reaction was a startled squeak of "Oh." Followed by another "Oh." that was longer and more stretched out.

"You can get up," she said, and Death found herself doing so, and staggering her way back to the bed.

Starfire went over to Raven, then, and helped her up to the bed likewise where she began to hover in a healing trance.

Death's eyes met her own.

_**Well, that happened.** _

"I.....I suppose so. yes."

Death's gaze was quiet.

_**I don't mind that you have that power, Koriand'r. Someone who's been through what you've been through is the least likely to abuse it, or to want to abuse it.** _

Starfire's eyes narrowed and she moved with a great speed toward Death, who cringed and seemed to cower a little.

For a moment Starfire remembered her own past, when she had been hurt and Blackfire, dear unlovely and unwelcome Blackfire had come to scourge her with word and starbolt and she'd cringed like this.

"Then why the cowering?"

_**I am not well. I was dying, and dying swiftly. Your girlfriend restored one of my feathers and stopped the gangrene. She's given reality an extended chance, and given me the ability to not telescope the end of my function into now, as opposed to when it would have been.** _

Death's lower jaw wibbled slightly and she groaned in pain as she tried to flex her right wing, which was sore from being stuck in the form it was and couldn't move. Raven had healed the gangrene and stopped her decay but now the wing was immobile and she, who had taken for granted certain elements of freedom of her form could not change it.

Death sighed.

_**It's both funny and sad but when I get a direct taste of my own function I react like anyone else. I know that at the end of all things I am the last thing in existence, and if I die, if I truly die, Existence goes with me and there's no change like when the Anti-Monitor or that monster in the swollen armor with her little 'World Tree' did things. I'm busy, then, with some universes and not with others, because nothing there is ever truly consistent. There's no new universe, no Pre-Crisis or Post-Crisis, no Silver Age or Bronze Age or New Fifty-Two. There's nothingness, the story is over, the author has moved on.** _

Death's gaze was haunted.

_**Out of everything that could or would have occurred to me, I never thought I could die or be at risk of death. I take mortal form once a century on every world with sapience, to be myself, and to do what I will, as I will.** _

Her gaze flicked to Raven.

_**That's not the same as this. It's my flaunting my power at one level and seeking to know how to do my job better at another. This?** _

Koriand'r hovered over to the stiff wing and even one as hardened as she be the experiences with the Gordanians and the Psions felt nauseous at the sight of the damaged wing where the feathers had been detached.

Death's smile was far more cynical than her usual, too much so to a point that it seemed to mar her face.

_**Now you see, and you see what drove her to that.** _

"Did we do this when we-" Starfire's words were quick, slurred by worry and shame and guilt, but it was Death who shook her head.

_**No. Sex is sex. You two are good, don't get me wrong, but nothing in Existence is** _ **that** _**good.** _

Starfire snorted.

_**No, that's a result of a number of things. Raven turned my power against me if I tried to regain my feathers and I refused to accept that a superhero, or a demoness, could take my power from me like that. And I pushed too hard, for too long. I would have killed myself if I had pushed for longer. The binding isn't doing this either, not by itself. I've been bound before, on smaller and larger scales.** _

She shuddered.

Timothy saved me from an aspiring rapist who would have turned me into a slave by the name that is one of the ones marked in my blood on that control feather. If that had _**happened, I don't know what could or would have happened, but......**_

She held herself, her boots seemingly phasing away to reveal bare feet with her toenails as much near claw-like as her fingernails, her arms wrapping around her legs as she winced with the spastic jerking of her wing, a deep and sharp and pained breath hissing between her lips.

_**So no, rest assured that it is neither the binding nor the sex in itself. It's refusing to accept that I have limits, that I am not omnipotent and not omniscient, and it's a bunch of other things. I....I made a foolish decision, a very bad one, in doing why I did what I dd and the way it was done. In a healthier mindset none of this would have happened. I wanted to ease my loneliness, and so I did. I wanted to have myself humbled, and so I am. But the problem with this, with everything, is that actions have consequences. My own power was turned against me and it bit, deeply.** _

She looked at Starfire with eyes of darkness that seemed to shine a bit with light and Starfire found her gaze hypnotized by her beauty, and her anger and fear dispelled as she sat by her, looking to get permission and when a single nod was given, slipping her arm around her.

_**I'm not afraid of you, exactly. More afraid of this, of all of this, of what it is to be here, to be here like this. I was dying, Koriand'r. Dying. Me.** _

A shaky warbling laugh followed.

_**And even if I've reached this point, this is.....** _

Her gaze turned to Raven, as did Starfire's. 

**_This is a holding pattern, something that halts things where they are now. And it can't be maintained forever. Raven is powerful, as powerful as her father and in a fight the Spectre could hurt me, even banish one of my forms to my own realm, though he can't slay the idea and the reality of death. And her father is one of the only entities in existence who matched the Spectre at his prime even at his weakest._ **

Her smile went from cynical to bitter and cold.

_**She is stronger than he is, she banished him. She could call upon that power at any point, and if she chose to wield that on me she could make herself a being who even when benevolent would be too much a threat to the war of Order and Chaos to be allowed to live. I am weak, but the concept endures even if the being that sustains it is tottering, for as long as I do.** _

She raised her right hand and looked at it, clenching it into a fist and then lowering it on the bed, her left hand moving likewise, though the palm was flat as she leaned back slightly, shuddering.

 ** _I.....I regret nothing about what I did that day. I changed, now there are none of us among the Endless who are innocent, not in that way. I needed that, and I think you two also did. Your relationships changed, what it was ended, and something new took its place. But.....if this slips again, I go back to dying. To feeling myself slipping away, to...._**.

Starfire again took an impulsive decision, lifting Death's face to face her own, and she leaned down to give her a light kiss on the lips, not so much to silence her as to give her something better to think about and to break the morbid streak. That was clear to Death, who gave her a sweet, even sad smile.

_**Then again, it did stop, and I have one of the feathers back. If I can get more back, I might regain strength enough that I can actually heal, as opposed to holding myself together.** _

"If you don't...."

Death's laugh for a moment was that of the older Death before her decision to incarnate herself once a century. Cold and cruel and brittle, and it was a jarring sharpness that pierced ear and soul like a sword.

**_You wouldn't notice the difference if I did not. One second you would hear the beating of wings and then I lock the universe behind me and I leave, probably to disintegrate into ashes and hope that it won't hurt to do that._ **

Raven was awake now, and she sat on her bed beside them.

_Well, if not for the honor of the thing...._

Starfire smiled.

"Glad you're OK."

Not half as much as I am, Raven's lip quirked.

Starfire then asked "So why is there bread on the floor?"

JUMP CITY WATERFRONT, THREE MILES FROM TITANS TOWER:

_**Why here?** _

The Demiurgos looked at his brother.

_They will come here. Odin won't let himself be lured onto a battlefield that has already been fought over unless there is no choice._

Lucifer clicked his teeth.

_My brother....._

_**Yes, Michael?** _

_You are the Star-Kindler, not simply a swordsman._

_**Your point?** _

_They will come to kill, this time, not merely to drive us off. We cannot afford to soft-hand this. She is dying, brother._

Lucifer froze.

_**That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even Death may die.** _

_Yes, brother. Yet if she does......_

Lucifer blinked.

_**I.....I see.** _

_**Yes. I think our goal, for now, must be to keep her from dying. The Source Wall is breaking, and her recovery alone cannot prevent what has already begun. Not now.** _

_And the feather?_

_**You're right. It can't be fixed so neatly as all that. There are other goals, and other elements, that have become intertwined within it.** _

Michael snorted.

 _Better this than Metal, I suppose_.

Lucifer laughed, genuinely and truly laughed and then threw a friendly punch at Michael.

_**Truth.** _

Then came a strange flash of light and before them stood anew forces of nature in vaguely humanoid form. Two Gods and one Goddess.

Only the God on the Left, the towering swollen giant that he was with his thick red beard, did not wield any weapon with Enochian.

Odin had two spears and three swords, though he held the first in his hand with a sinister grin.

On the right there was Freyja, a being of perfect power and beauty, no less redolent with the aura of death and the dead than Odin, and with her was a great sword that gleamed with Enochian runes.

Odin hurled Gungnir and with that the Angels moved, the Demiurgos becoming a being of brilliant golden light and raising his own sword, the Morningstar hovering above with his wings shining with light and in his eyes gleamed the power of the stars that he had kindled. There was no time to waste with this, so they had to move brutally, and quickly. After all, if a few million mortals went to limbo for a time they could just re-embody them back, it was a trivial task next to ordering and shaping the Universe itself.

TITANS TOWER: 

"So....what are we supposed to do?"

Most of the people who asked this looked to Superman, who raised his hands in a helpless kind of shrug.

"We're talking about the two angels that basically made the universe, I'm sure they'll be fine here."

Superman tapped his chin, pondering.

"Beyond that.....right now, in this tower, we have one of the most powerful beings in the multiverse and she is both not well and dangerous enough to make Raven look like a cuddly bunny."

Changeling couldn't resist a bark of laughter at a memory that crossed at that phrase, then sweat-dropped while rubbing the back of his head when everyone else turned their gaze to him in a pattern that almost looked choreographed.

"This is basically like having a wounded and dying Darkseid in the basement. There's nowhere else, right now, that we should be. We can't solve every problem by punching it in the face but here? We can't leave it to the Titans alone, either, because this is more than just a Titans thing. This is the world, perhaps on par with the Crisis or the incident with the monster and the World-Tree."

Flash made a low whistle.

"After this we probably all earned a vacation." The joke got louder and slightly warbling laugh than it deserved but it dispelled the tension somewhat.


	14. Praise to Nero's Neptune:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angels and Gods clash, two brothers work together, and reality's fate hangs in the balance.

JUMP CITY WATERFRONT:

As a clash in mortal perception it was surprisingly short in duration and in span. Five human heartbeats, no more and no less.

The brilliant forces unleashed were awesome in their scale, the Rings of the Green Lantern Corps chiming in both alarm and in resignation, for nothing save the One Who Would be Last could match the forces therein, and even then it was not something of equality so much as a very different kind of being expressed in a fundamentally alien way. The Green Lanterns alone among mortals caught a fuller glimpse of the clash and even then their understanding was but merely partial, a glimpse of beings of perfect power and perfect beauty warring with flashes of light and things that both were blades and not blades. Much of the Jump City waterfront was leveled, the people who lived there evacuating the premises after the clash that preceded it, moving to the kind of shelters installed after the Days of Stone.

Five heartbeats, peals of thunder that echoed in terrifying swiftness that was clearly no natural storm. Flashes of light that were partially lightning, partially not.

If they had been able to witness it they would have seen the Morningstar summoning into himself his star-flame, his eyes glowing with a brilliant heat that melted some buildings around him and set fire to the wharf. They would have seen the Demiurgos raising his great sword and becoming as a star himself, and they would have seen Thor hurl Mjolnir as Frejya and Odin moved in perfect unity, Mjolnir colliding with the face of the Morningstar and to his own shock hurling him back. Odin on the left, Frejya on the right, and both dueling the Demiurgos. Freyja the discipline of war, austere and in economy of motion at each possible level, no element stronger than it had to be, none wasted. Odin a berserker moving in frenzied madness that could not be neatly countered. 

The stars and the thunderstorm vied in the skies above, as the Demiurgos held himself equal to the Lord of the Gallows and the mistress of Folkvangr, but to his surprise and consternation, the Enochian runes writ into the blades meant they were more than merely equals to the finest power of the Silver City, they were capable in the right motions of inflicting major harm, even death. This meant his caution increased and he fought for a time on the defensive, as peals of thunder and the smell of ozone in the air intensified, Thor and the Morningstar moving at paces that he could not afford to chart.

He groaned in pain when the blades lanced out and drew golden blood, rocking back in pain and then the blades would descend twice more, as the Morningstar swept down, unleashing a tremendous blast of plasma that was at least half a star, sufficient to rock Thor back with enough force. Clasping his hand to his brother's, four heartbeats lapsed, both looked at the force opposing them.

For the first time in a very long time, the cumulative power of Asgard looked upon two of the beings of the Silver City, blood coating Lucifer's jaws, red, a dark and unnatural red, product of his Fallen nature that made him more like the creation than what he was. And golden blood coating the Demiurgos. Together, they had brought forth the universe, together their power wrought Time and Night, and gave them the power to spawn their creation the Endless, though one of their earliest creations would outlive them both, and even the Presence. And together they stood, that Power surging in a sudden pulse of forcus greater than anything that had gone before it, far greater in its way than the power of Death that had surged out in those terrifying demonstrations of strength. 

It was a power matched among the three Aesir that faced it only by Odin himself, who likewise was a creative force, and called upon the fullest nature of this and of his own strength and for a moment he was the towering entity that with his two brothers, the sons of Bor, had built the world from the fabric of Ymir. In that clash of power, they proved more equal than Odin had true reason to suspect when his Enochian-runed blades were held up by that power and the runes formed a great shield. But in that clash an explosive power erupted outward, and the Aesir found themselves carried along as by a great wind, landing with a brutish-sounding crunch in Uppsala, near the symbols of the old Well and Tree.

 _Well, that didn't quite go as planned_ , grumbled Frejya.

Odin raised himself to his feet.

_My dear Vanadis, we faced the power that currently defines and upholds the universe dedicated to our absolute destruction, and we are still here. Undamaged save by the impact that hurled us outward. I daresay it exceeded my wildest imaginings._

Odin's gaze looked out to the stars.

_The Source Wall is breaking, things are beginning to move that never should have seen the light of day once more. This and other things shall hold the attention of the Morningstar and the Demiurgos, and when they do, we shall return and this time, confront them directly._

_Confront who?_

_The team of so-called heroes that calls itself the Titans._

_Ah. The feather, then._

_No, not the feather itself, it is entrusted to the power of one who does not know what she's done nor how she's done it. We shall take for ourselves the daughter of Trigon. It is not the steel that is powerful but the hand that wields it, and we shall grasp the hand in a grip of iron. We are not done, though our role in this part of this element has brought forth the next stage._

Odin smiled, coldly.

With a casual display of his power he summoned fire and from it they looked upon imagery of another realm, a vast and lava-filled place of primordial power more ancient than they, or the Ymir-giant that had become one of the backdrops of Creation.

 _He knows. He knows the stars are going out, that Death is dying. He knows we can prevent his own function, and he will do his best to....ensure it. I wondered what sort of force could leave the Master of the Book so rattled that he would leave his garden. His siblings? No. He has seen two of them die, and another change. He would let her die, or cast aside her sigil, as he let the other cast down his if it came to that. That would not be near enough, though it is a lie that comes easily and would be believed._

The image of a great figure who had spent time in a kind of trance moving a great sword into a scabbard haunted them.

_But him? His realm come round to ensure that Wyrd becomes what it would? The destructive power of his awakening, at the time the Source Wall breaks? That would do it. It meddles in his sphere in a way he would never permit._

Odin's smile was still colder, matching the coldness of flames that gave off no heat but shone brightly.

_So we wait, and the League, those other heroes that have thronged there? They shall behold the arising of Surtr, who has faced them but a few times before, and in the wake of his unveiling his Sword of Ending, the field shall be cleared._

_And what of her?_

_She will find out soon enough. Even if that which has slowed her decay holds, she is bound to the Earth and to its inhabitants, a power that should be across multiple universes and planes shackled to one universe, and one planet within that universe. Away from her realm and from the direct power of the other Endless. She is vulnerable as she has not been since the most ancient of times, when Ymir had but emerged from the frost, when my grandfather was but a young deity among Gods. \_

_We seek mastery, Lady Vanadis, my son, to prevent a great harm. He will seek to restore that which he sees as inevitable and its doom. But we are not the only things out there. There are other forces, some within that Wall, some without, that have a great hatred for Death and the concept she represents. And as all dogfish do, when they scent her blood in the water, they too shall come._

Frejya's gaze was level.

_Do we enable them or do we stop them?_

_I shall be sending forth Huginn and Muninn to observe, and to detect that which has arisen, and that which shall arise. This is a time of flux, Lady Vanadis. Opportunity that comes seldom, and not all who have such potential will grasp it for what it is, but enough shall that it would be unwise to act without seeing who, if any, should seek to move, or to be moved here._

_Even in weakness, she is......_

_Yes. Even in weakness, were the daughter of Trigon to do what she has set in motion to do, to wield her as a weapon there is nothing that could withstand her short of the Presence, or the Morningstar and the Demiurgos. She is Life and she is Death, and against these concepts and their power, none could withstand their weight, for she is all of us and we are all within her power. It would break her at a much deeper level, it would damage her will and her mind deeply, but it could be done._

He mused, quietly.

_In time the two Archangels may come to regret their triumph and to see that victory is not so simple a thing as that._

The Aesir soon took stock of their wounds, and for a time would cross the Bifrost within Asgard, to partake of the Golden Apples and to bring new weapons down with them.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

Starfire's eyes could not tear themselves away from Death, who even with one of her feathers returned still needed Raven's help to walk, her damaged wing stiff and painful in its motions. She had heard the story about Death throwing bread at her brother, the Lord Shaper, the King of Stories, and she could not quite fathom the idea. Death's wounds were at a standstill but she was still gaunter than before, lines carved into an ageless face, and she could not walk on her own. Zauriel was there, the only one of the Angels who did not step out, and he was the one whose eyes were drawn not to Raven, but to Death first. Zauriel had encountered her a variety of times on her job, sometimes with others of her family, mostly not.

He was used to the Endless, though he neither liked nor trusted them, especially Desire and Delirium. They were all ageless, ever-young, and frankly bizarre and even incomprehensible at certain elements to who he was, and what he was. To see one this haggard and gaunt, with lines carved into an ageless face, with her motions displaying pain and the sense of an impossible kind of weakness and decay was...disoncerting.

They had had just enough time for Death to place herself on the sofa, at the edge, with enough room for her wing to extend upward, when the Morningstar and the Demiurgos returned. Both were still covered in blood, the Morningstar's jaw broken and part of the bone extending from his cheek, the Demiurgos sheened in golden blood. Zauriel's eyes were both wide and concerned, when the two, with what seemed a surprising amount of effort focused their power onto healing each other, the mystical effect leading to Zatanna, Fate, and Raven staggering like they'd gotten into a full bottle of vodka and were trying to convince themselves they had no effects even as they stumbled with and around each other.

Their eyes turned to Death, then.

Lucifer blinked, his vision clear, and strode without hesitation to the clipped wing, staring in horrified fascination, his hand reaching out to caress the ossified bone. Death, while still exhausted, suddenly jerked with an agonized scream as her eyes bugged out, and glared at Lucifer.

_**Really?** _

Her voice was cutting, an acidic bile that seemed more that of Morpheus than her, and his eyes too were drawn to the gaunt face with lines carved in it.....and then to something that Zauriel had missed in his initial sight.

Parts of her body were blackened, from the lower jaw to what seemed all of her stomach, a set of carbonized rune-like shapes carved into both arms. Between that and her more skeletal face, Lucifer's eyes reflected an emotion that he was not used to feeling. Fear.

**_How did this happen?_ **

His question was soft.

_**Even with the psychological effects of damage to one of your family, this shouldn't.....** _

He looked more closely at the wing.

_**You....you're.....** _

His eyes turned to Raven with a sudden wariness. Somehow, the daughter of Trigon, either her human self or worse, in his eyes, the scion and rightful leader of the Malebolge herself, had found a means to turn the power of Death and Ending on the concept herself. Little wonder, then, that the stars were dying and the Source Wall breaking. The surprise was more that things hadn't gone as far as they had.

His eyes turned to Raven.

**_She's in no position for more healing today. But you....._ **

His eyes traversed her, not with the kind of look he would have otherwise given for the fun of it (and to goad her girlfriend and Garfield Logan in the process) but with that same look that caught the wounds on Death, the visible and the....less so. Raven the human was not at all well, her essence was fraying. Pride, daughter of Trigon, to his further surprise and consternation, was no truly better off. There were deep grooves in her back that had seen the necrosis purged, but were by no means gone, grooves that matched the kind that Death's clawlike nails could give.

Her magic had been deeply taxed and with a child of Trigon, this was never a good thing. Their existence marked them among the most powerful entities known in this world, beings of somewhat less power than the Spectre but just beneath the kind of forces that Lucifer amused himself with on a daily basis. Each motion of theirs was one of precise control of power that could casually rewrite reality on a whim, and that control was sapped and the higher edges of that power coming into full focus.

**_You, Michael, Zauriel, and I need to have a little....talk._ **

With that Zauriel blinked. For a moment it wasn't the pretense of Raven looking at them but the presence of Pride herself.

**_Very well, Lord Morningstar Lord Demurgios, Zauriel, old friend. Let's talk._ **

In a brilliant flash of light the Morningstar, Demiurgos, and Zauriel found themselves in a place that was like a great mountain, after a fashion.

There was a low fog that extended to knee-height, and there were areas in that fog where there were remaining bits of blood splatter from that day, the blood still fresh as the day that it had fallen.

_**Here in my Nexus, what it is that you see can be....delayed.** _

_**Lord Morningstar, Lord Demiurgos, Zauriel.....I.......I screwed the pooch. Big-time. I've done all that I can to clean up my own mess, but I do not have the power to....to do this. Not on my own, and she can't either.** _

The sons of the Presence nodded. Michael spoke first.

_We know. You're the kind of person who would tell yourself harsher things than we will. Even if we wanted to-_

And here Michael put a significant stare at Lucifer, who casually flipped him the bird.

_She is dying, you.....she clawed you, didn't she?_

_**Yes, she put her.....power...into me. I used her sigil to.....heal.** _

_You're still scarred._

_**Oh I know. It's not like you can just get over that one clawing you and wielding the literal touch of Death, all the same**_.

 _ **I suspect**_ , said Lucifer, as his hand casually reached out to brush one of the scars as Pride jolted and turned with a dirty look and her hands blazing with fire, _**that using your power of healing and transferring pain means that the wounds are either poised to reopen or held together purely by your own strength. The human part of you, Rachel Roth, she is......**_

Pride blinked. _**I know. I......in the past I would have wanted nothing more than to discard her as weakness. Now? I know better. I learned it a long time ago when my father sought to command the world and we had to reunite to regain our power.**_

The Morningstar and Demiurgos, restored to synchronicity with use of their power even when one was Fallen, turned to her with their eyes gleaming with mutually brilliant starfire hues. Light extended from them, the form that their healing took in the realm of the daughter of Trigon, the same brilliant blue hue as her own hands, and she jerked, the claw-marks in her back healed and with them elements that she had not fully grasped. For a moment both halves of her took a deep breath, and then it was not Pride but Raven who saw herself and both of them and blinked.

_**Oh. I was right, wasn't I? That clawing bit a little more deeply than either of us wanted to admit.** _

_Yes, you were_

**_Oh good. Nice to know I wasn't a total moron on everything._ **

The angels snorted.

Zauriel, seeing that one crisis had been thankfully averted, took his time to stalk through the mists, sniffing to find what to his surprise were several bright spatters of-

 **Yes, that's her blood.** The voice of Pride answered, her body appearing next to him. ** _I restored some of it to her to contain her decay. The rest of it is still here, I'm not sure how this much blood got there, but then her body was capable of ah.....things....that a merely mortal or even superhuman being couldn't have taken. The damage to her wings alone doesn't account for it, I know that. I don't know what else did._**

She pondered. 

**_I......._ **

Looking at the amount splattered herself, again, she squatted by it.

_**This wasn't here when we ah....did things. How many things can injure the Endless, exactly? You would know better than I would, Archangels!** _

They looked at each other.

 _ **Well she does have a point,**_ murmured Lucifer.

_**Not very many, Pride.** _

He strode to the spatter himself and then he froze, his eyes narrowing. **_Hurm._**

_**We will need to talk to her. Either her health is less......than we understood, or something bad happened before she came here.** _

Raven's nose twitched and a strange set of emotions flashed in such speed she didn't have the time to process them, as Pride pinched her nose and huffed.

_**Well, great. More good news.** _

She turned to the Archangels.

**_How long do we have to fix this?_ **

Michael answered her.

_After this evening by Earth's standards? Eight Earth days, at the rate that her weakness is in a fuller analysis. We could see things from the Silver City, but only She knows the full nature of everything about the Endless in this sense. The thing about the universe.....falling apart, the way it does when her power over her function decays is that it's like an avalanche rolling downhill._

His smile was wan.

_**She left her function behind before the Fall, when the Silver City was one, and when the Old Ones walked under the stars that were right.** _

His smile was cold.

_**They sleep now in Dreaming-Death, and one of them has a necropolis that is the core of the Earth, a deeper core that predates most standards and concepts of creations of humanity and the dream-time we know. In that time the very earliest of the Oans were beginning to grasp the deeper nature of their powers. We were but new, then, in the sense of dreaming and of its natures. We saw what happened the last time reality.......the last time that things altered the way they did, and as they did. We saw it. It began with the stars freezing, and then monsters were born. Nekron, the so-called Life Entity, the twin faces and duality of her function that were once a single entity and then....shattered.** _

_**Something that calls itself Perpetua, a being with the power to remake not merely a universe, but the entire system of things therein.** _

_**And it let other things in, things the Source Wall was meant to keep out. The Old Ones slumber, but there are those that would come after them, beings that have made a similar shift. One of them attacked our world along with others, using a World Tree, and....the Gem. Of another world.** _

Raven froze.

_**I remember that.** _

_**Yes, you do. We....all do. We do. Most of the mortals don't, quite. The Endless do, too. They do not, as a rule, care for involvement in that kind of crisis. When the quantum singularities show up, however, that is more than sufficient to do so, because they can.....rewrite the concepts.** _

Both Raven and Pride froze.

_**And the Source Wall keeps them out?** _

_**In that fuller sense, yes.** _

Raven and Pride blinked and gulped.

_**Well uh......how fast can we get this done?** _

_**That is the question. As is the element of making sure there's no other surprises here.** _

_**There aren't. It's my realm, I would know. Besides, I already checked. The blood's here, my blood was here and now I....don't see it. So thanks for that, I suppose.** _

_**Fair enough.** _

Lucifer held a jar with the blood of Death of the Endless in it that gleamed with an eerie light that reflected itself in her Nexus, casting its gleam through the fog.

_**Eight days and seven nights. And unfortunately, mortals have to sleep.** _

Lucifer and Michael and Zauriel grinned.

**_Fortunately for you, we don't._ **

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

That night the teams slept easier. The Aesir were gone, the two most powerful entities in existence were able to devote the full power of omnipotence unbound and working together as in the time when they had forged the current iteration of the universe. Lucifer had quietly sent word to Mazikeen to maintain a guard for any new entities that would try to skulk in, not wishing Mazikeen to be in more direct personal risk where the power that bound the feathers was concerned.

Lucifer and Michael worked through the night and both realized two elements. At the one level, with their full power at work it would be simple enough to first restore the sensation in her nerves, and then to either reattach the feathers or restore her healing, whichever one she would prefer for all but the command feather. The second was that the enchantments there were something that had an element of power in it that was not entirely of Raven's make, something that confused them. The simplest way to parse it was an unholy mesh of Endless and Trigonian designed to a point that any such force that was not of the entities whose power was within that feather seeking to unmake it would unleash Death's power to its fullest extent.

Michael blinked.

 _ **Well**_ , he sat back, stretching for a moment, enjoying the illusion of mortality and tweaking his brother in the process.

_**We know now that it is possible to make a rock so heavy that omnipotence cannot lift it.** _

Lucifer snorted.

**_It's a good thing you're here, brother. If I had tried to wield this thing it might have......well, she would have taken me much, much earlier than I plan to go._ **

Michael nodded.

_I wonder how she did this._

Lucifer shrugged. I _ **'m not entirely sure she and they did. There are other forces out there, my brother, beyond us and beyond our universe. I suspect that the unmaking of the command feather without it destroying the three beings tied here is going to be a bit of a chore and it's not going to be our problem, exactly. The magic here is coded too precisely.** _

His nose twitched.

_**Well, on the bright side, reality won't disintegrate. We know what we can do with the feathers.** _

Michael nodded.

_The feathers are just part of the problem. We have to get Death to lessen her own decay before we can get to that point._

Lucifer shrugged.

**_She's the happiest entity in creation, and she knows that she will outlive all of us, even if she is by no means the most powerful being in existence. How hard could it be?_ **

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Raven and Starfire slept that night, soundly. Death slipped out from their arms, and sat at the edge of the bed, one of her wings folded against her, the other curved up, her eyes staring into the shadows. Her arms were wrapped around Cavendish, and for a moment, she, who was several tens of billions of years old, born when the first of the living entities that knew this corner of existence was born and giving it the breath of life, felt the full weight of that time, and the burden of her own survival. The shadows deepened and a coldness came into the room and into the tower, and even the Archangels felt it, Zauriel roused from his trance of waiting near the edge of the tower with Mazikeen, who likewise shivered, her breath frosting.

The cold intensified as Death wondered, in the end, if it might not be worth it to escape as her brother had, damn the consequences. She was tired of existence, of the weight of a job that was hated, of recognizing that she'd essentially taken a wrecking ball to the universe again and that the monsters she'd made were crawling out of the woodwork. Weariness weighed on her like a mountain and as she had in the conclave of the Endless, she wept. Her hand reached her sigil, which began to glow and thrum with a force that sent ripples out into the Earth. Her side, unnoticed and to a degree unfelt due to the wound reopening in the blackened areas of her skin that no longer felt like it was truly a part of her, bled, the blood blocked by a cautious ward of Raven's and appearing in another 'collection' place beside the feathers. Death knew nothing of this, not then, nor in that night. She barely recalled the incident from when her damaged wing had inhibited her motion in an encounter with something strange in a realm between the universes.

They awoke Raven and Starfire, and the rest of the teams, as the buildings rattled, and it was Raven's hand on Death's shoulder, her head resting against her that caused her to start shaking and shake her head. The moment passed, and she curled on the bed, her wing raised up and casting shadows eerie even by Raven's standard and the rest of the night passed without incident.

In the meeting room the only response to this that Michael gave Lucifer was a single raised eyebrow, and Lucifer taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.

MUSPELHEIM, ROYAL PALACE:

On his throne, Surtr, King of Muspelheim awoke as from the trance where his gaze of fire charted the course of time and sought secret means to stir greater power. He remembered the encounter with the Justice Society with some distaste, though it did not mean that much to him more than a more minor clash with jumped up mortals. His hand went to a hilt on his scabbard, and he snarled. The stars, those things in part coded as traces of the fires of his realm, as they were countless other things all at once, were going out, their light frozen in place, simple pearls in infinite darkness and coldness.

A fate-caught time, he spoke with tectonic power that echoed through Muspelheim, and around the branches and limbs of the World-Tree.

**Odin, that little shit, thinks he can postpone the end of time, when the sword swings and I go to her embrace. I'll not have that.**

Surtr strode from his throne and walked through the halls of his palace, coming to a vast gate, the means he used to cross between worlds as easily as between streets. It resembled a great door uncannily akin to that of fallen Azarath, and from it he stepped on what seemed like endless stairs through a vast world-tree that linked not merely to the Nine Realms, but to fifty-two universes and each of the branches and leaves elements of Hypertime. Up he strode, marching casually. He knew which realm he was going to and why he was going there. Earth Forty-Eight, where one of the Endless had done a foolish thing and moored their entire cross-time self anchored not in their realm, but a mortal world incapable of bearing the strain.

He was in no particular hurry. To rule Muspelheim was a great task, one that he could do when gazing into the fires and when enjoying the company and realm and time of his hearth. He suspected that if things went pear-shaped and the Endless FUBARed it that badly, he'd find himself on that battlefield and his sword unleashed in full fire and glory soon enough. If it didn't....so much the better. He marched on, noticing that one of the Fifty-Two worlds remained an empty nothingness. He snorted. That world had been, once, a realm where the so-called Thousand Year Reich had managed by ill fortune and terrible bargains with entities such as Darkseid to prevail and stamped an iron boot on the neck of humanity. The monster that had laid siege to the World-Tree had rendered that one branch white as snow and almost a set of terrain worthy of Niflheim, vast moraines and mountains of ice-like substance. His grin was fearsome as he strode past it, though the sense of up and down and across in this tree were only loosely akin to up and down, some branches very much greater and drooping, others less so. 


	15. Twists and Turns:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael, Lucifer, and Raven work on healing Death's wings, as the distorting effects of Death's illness ripples out across reality.

THE MULTIVERSE:

The Endless are not entities in the senses of Mongul or the Monitors or others that seek to go forth into the fierce and brawling clashes of gods and goddesses old and new. Theirs is not the decree to go forth and trade blows with others, great and small alike. Theirs is an existence both as person and as concept, governing great forces. Were the lesser of the Endless to leave their governance of their function it would persist, if in a less direct fashion. Were the greater and older of the Endless to seek to change their own natures reality itself trembles and unravels.

The Multiverse could not and to a great degree did not know that the wave of strange issues with and within starlight were the products of the changes in one of the Endless, nor that the oscillations between life and death heralded this. The dead rose in several of the Fifty-One worlds, and their associated hypertime. Not in the sense of Nekron's hordes of ravening undead resurrected to fuel his bid for conquest, the dead literally retook bodies, sometimes whole and reborn....and other times resurrected with all the unloveliness of the nature and the manner of their deaths.

In the especially unlucky worlds when Death's decay had advanced far enough, her power withdrew. At first this was heralded as a blessing, for with her withdrawal the more malevolent serial killers skulked in the distant elements. For others it was immediately seen for the curse it was, and within a few days there were many who longed for death and were unable to die, and chaos spread further. The breakdown of entropy proceeded both slowly and swiftly, by fits and starts as the great and the mighty sought to serve as firebreaks against such entities.

At first it was merely Earth-48 that had seen the loss of ability to have new children as well as the steady decay of death as a concept, for Death is Life and Birth and Rebirth as well as Death. Where nothing old could pass, nothing new could rise. Then it began to spread outward, the last of the Fifty-One worlds the first to be affected, in the span of years since Death's wings were clipped. Each of her efforts to free herself had cast progressively wider ripples, and the third, the one that had nearly brought on her own unmaking, was when Death's function began to grind to a halt in the rest of the Multiverse. The Monitors immediately grasped that something very bad was happening, for the Source Wall, the thing that had barred the Multiverse and creaked during the onslaught of the monster that sought to wield the Gem to devour their corner of Existence into itself, had gone from creaking to corroding.

In the past these had been works of an enemy, but here it was as if.....the Monitors froze. Seldom did the Endless assert themselves in such a fashion in the material warp and weft of the universe. They worked within its higher echelons and were part of what held its very element together, the weight of Existence deforming beneath the weight of their presence. Of the Seven, Destiny could be as mighty as the Anti-Monitor or other such entities were he to deem the time right to be. Dream was master of Story and thus one of the mightiest beings in disguise, one who understood the four-cornered (and sometimes rather more fluid) and brightly colored elements of existence more than most.

And then there was Death.

Very early in their tenure in this multiverse, Death of the Endless had returned from where she departed to in realms beyond their knowledge. Each time she came back changed, seldom for the better. Each time she sought to discard her position, and yet it had not worked. Only the very most secret of elements, some of which were rumored to have driven the Anti-Monitor mad, gave indications as to the prospect of just what secrets lay behind the most immortal and enduring of the cosmic principles known as the Endless. They spoke of elements of change and alteration, of Death enduring from prior iterations of the multiverse and giving numbers and names. They spoke of multiverses beyond that of Perpetua who was bound within the Source Wall and in the time of Death discarding her function had run rampant and sought to re-order reality, and for a brief and horrid moment had succeeded.

They knew of these secrets indirectly, and by carefully handled distributions of the wider elements in their archives.

The pattern at last set, and the Monitors were left without much that could be done. Against a foe they could fight, and fight hard, and fight well. Against one of the Endless entrapped by her own demons, there was nothing to fight, only to seek to manage.

Zip Hermuz, lord of the Monitors, cast his vision widely across the sheer expanse of Existence. They could not fight Death, and she had tried not once but many times to discard the task only for it to return to her for none who sought to wield it could bear up against it and the attitudes of mortals....and seeking to balance that hatred on the part of mortals was worse than an exercise in futility. It served its purposes, though it made the task of being the Eldest sister of the Endless a task that wore down on the entity who bore it. Few could see behind the smiles to the deeper truth, fewer who could, cared. Zip had seen it from early on and warned his fellows, but the same senile fool that he'd replaced had insisted all was well.

Reality unraveled, as entropy and the elements of decay and the processes unleashed by Death broke down. It began to freeze into a realm that was locked within bodies that screamed silently, jaws shut, eyes incapable of perception, perfect jewels lifeless and ever-young in some areas, and in others the explosive process of sub-atomic changes began to produce peculiar flashes of energy that moved slowly and yet inexorably. The creature Nekron, banished after Herculean efforts, found itself able to rip itself clean of its prison, and to claw its way back into existence.

 **What did all this?** Zip Hermuz's reaction was dismayed, awed, and none dared meet his gaze.

Nix Uotan strode to him quietly and whispered into his ear what had been determined by careful observation of the Endless and by data gathered with respect but nonetheless gathered.

Zip blinked. **What the fuck?** The shout drew attention from some of the Monitors while others watched both the Source Wall corroding, the slow but inexorable steps of Surtr across the realm between worlds toward Earth-48, and the blend of resurrections in some worlds and the collapse of new life across the multiverse, life freezing into an eternal present. 

Zip began to issue orders to chart the most likely and most dangerous larger scale forces unleashed, the better to be proactive and part of him was relieved at the same token that his first great crisis was not some rogue member of their species, nor some malignant horror. The memories of the monster with the World Tree and its attacks on the Monitors and the losses they had taken was still raw. His predecessor had foolishly challenged the beast only to be broken.

At the same token, Zip decided that the policy of his kind toward the Endless would have to change. The disappearance of Death those endless aeons ago and the wake of the rise of the Guardians of the Universe were the two things that had made them become what they were and how they were. The death of the first Despair threw up ripples still, the quasi-monsters known as the Jokers but one species-specific manifestation, the House of Zod another. Then the capture of the core of Dream of the Endless had nearly unraveled the collective Imagination of all life. And now this.

For now, there was only the direct crisis. Later.....decisions would have to be made. 

TITANS TOWER, KITCHEN AND MEETING ROOM: 

The next day had dawned without incident, Changeling awakening and pouring himself a bowl of non-dairy milk with cereal and sitting at the couch watching old TiVoed Looney Tunes recordings. It was Jon Stewart, the Green Lantern, who happened to wake up next.

He looked at Changeling and the ease with which he was just...rolling...with all of this and he couldn't resist the question.

"How are you just...calm here? We're dealing with Gods, Angels, Archangels, Demons, the fucking Grim Reaper in multiple senses of the word....just...how?"

Changeling shrugged. "Seen weirder shit with the Doom Patrol."

Green Lantern raised his pointer finger, mouth open, blinked, and then paused. "Oh right. You guys dealt with that arch-villain Morrison the Contriver."

"Yep."

"I suppose dealing with Grant Morrison would make an Endless just...doing...this seem easy by comparison."

"Yep."

With that Green Lantern went on to fix himself some scrambled eggs and orange juice, mind pondering over just what things the Doom Patrol must have faced at the hands of Grant Morrison that made this seem normal.

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Raven and Starfire were showering, Death staring blankly and bleakly at the walls of the room. The questions that haunted her last night had not faded, they were what had driven her to her folly to begin with. It did not help that Lucifer, who had a great deal of resentment for her from their encounter during his creation of his own universe, was going to have something massive to hold over her for a very long time after this. The same Lucifer who had taken petty slights stemming from the murder of Saraquael as the genesis of his rebellion and his Fall. And who, more than eight billion years later was still the resentful and spiteful figure who had orchestrated everything that he had against his father.

And even the first Presence leaving his own creation behind wasn't enough to redeem nor to alter those realities.

She clicked her teeth, as Lucifer kept switching between pondering the nature of the feathers and of her wounds. He'd told her that her own mental state contributed to it, and of this she had no doubt it was so but how did one overcome billions of years of quiet anxieties and resentments and fears that erupted out and which could not neatly be further suppressed? She looked at her wing, which was numb, not hurting. Whatever Raven had done worked enough for that point. Part of her pondered, in point of fact.....

She reached for the feather that had been reattached, probing at it, and then gasped in horror when it slid out of her wing and landed with a boom that caused both of the Archangels' heads to swoon and Raven, who had just slid into her civilian clothes to gaze in shock and horror and then turning nearly as pale as Death. Death shuddered, and felt the blood flowing from the wound, then bit her lip.

She looked at Raven sadly.

**_I don't think that approach can work. It......it expects me to go back to what led us here. If that version of me was workable this whole situation wouldn't exist in the first place. This....._ **

She mused.

**_I think we may be going about all of this the wrong way, and I certainly wasn't helping._ **

Lucifer and Michael looked at her carefully.

**_If I were able to regrow my feathers, or get to the point where I could, then the outer shape of my wings would be a detail, up to a point. I'd need to spend a few years with the.....me-ness of me here, rather than in my own realm, maybe, but...._ **

She strode over to them, as they stared at the feathers.

Zauriel sniffed and then his gaze turned toward her and Starfire's head followed his motion, and then the rest followed it.

 **Death,** he said with some faint shock, **you're bleeding. On your side. Are those...claw marks?**

She looked down, holding her hand to her side.

**_Oh. Huh. Yeah. Before I came here, I encountered some sort of monster. Had skin the color of blood and six eyes and it was in a bit of a state. I don't think she knew where she was or who was facing her. I....._ **

Her vision blurred and she asked.

**_Why are there two of everyone? Did we do doubles day and I not not-_ **

And with that Death fell on her face and suddenly concerned, Raven looked at the containment for the wards. What had been less a jar and more the equivalent of a gallon jug overflowed, only her magic preventing.....

_How much blood volume does an Endless have, exactly?_

_Enough that this much is.....not a good sign._ Michael's eye twitched slightly, and then he sought to move her, a task joined by the rest to make it simpler for at times the Endless could be deceptively like a mountain in the form of a small person. 

With that they pulled Death over on her side as the starlight froze again in the multiverse, and more of the Dead awoke from the Sunless lands and those who would have died waited in vain, as the prolongation of life in most cases proved a torment while in others extending joy in manners foul and fair alike.

There were claw marks, four, and shards of metal in the wound, as if a gauntlet had torn and somehow broken.

Raven sought to lay her hand on the wound only for Lucifer to raise his finger and wag it firmly in a negative gesture that Raven understood, as Lucifer and Michael concentrated their power together. Several smaller shards rose as what almost seemed a brilliant dust cloud but two larger ones coated in iridescent blood came with them. All in the room were conditioned to accept such sights by means foul and fouler, so none were squeamish. Instead that power that had removed the shards re-stitched together the torn parts of the flesh, and the blood that had been called out saw the wards collapse by a snapping of Raven's fingers, and flowed as a stream in mid-air, rejoining into the body of Death, who seemed almost to be asleep.

It was Michael who moved near her and gently used a small element of his power to awaken her.

_**I am sorry, eldest sister of the Endless, that you cannot truly sleep, not yet, but you cannot. Your realm is unraveling, and absent that feather, or the means to regrow them....** _

Death nodded, blearily.

 _ **Okay.**_ Her voice was soft and it sounded like that of someone much younger than she was, flavored with tears and trembling in an almost stuttered fashion.

Lucifer and Michael gazed more intently at the wound and its nature with a sight and a presence that Raven was able to augment. Starfire's right hand held Death's, the left stroking her cheek as Death leaned into the touch, sighing with a weary sound that had Raven wincing at the nature of it.

Hmm....I was right. This is a metaphysical and an emotional injury, at the one level, but.....you were also right that the people who made the mess have to help repair it.

Their stare turned to Starfire, who looked at them with initial bemusement and then with a sudden dawning moment of comprehension as her glowing green eyes widened.

"Oh....." the word was long and drawn-out, shading through three different emotions and four different facial expressions before she nodded.

"I do not have the skill with magic that girlfriend Raven does, but what I can do, I will."

They nodded.

The power of Creation in its fullest form gave them sight and understanding of the inner workings of other beings, amplified in this case by the will of the Presence. The nature of the wounds dealt to Death were made more fully and completely visible, and so too the prospects she'd mentioned that perhaps there were....other means...to untangle the mess. With them as well was a core within Death that made Lucifer very thoughtful, she was there, she was doing what she did and as she did it, and he had thought her content, even obnoxiously cheerful. What he looked upon and beheld was a being unfathomably ancient, one who went back to the dawn-time, before Perpetua, before Krona, in the beginning when storied Xoth had dwelt in cheerful glee and what became this universe was taking its first winding steps. And the weariness of such truthfully Endless existence told.

Countless iterations that had unfolded in deep time, and a sense of aloofness and fearfulness to let go of the sorrows and emotions that underlaid all of this. Michael saw it too, and within their limits of perception and power, so did Raven and Starfire. They did not see the ancient realm of Xoth, and if they had, they would not have understood what they saw. They saw a glimpse of reaches of time so distant that it seemed impossible to come near fully grasping, and that Death was weary and profoundly lonely and aching for things she had forgotten how to express.

And in that where the Angels saw things in a sense of antiquity and patterns that their patterns more distantly removed in ways than those of the Endless and closer to those of mortals in others could not grasp this, Raven the empath and Starfire, who understood very well elements of that kind of loneliness, if far less removed in time and space, understood immediately.

Raven spoke to the rest in a psychic communication meant to be less taxing on Death. 

_The universe needs her to be able to restore equilibrium to restore that to itself._

She put her finger on her chin, staring in thought.

_It needs this. But what she needs as an individual is a way beyond that loneliness. Not simply.....what was done, but a means to be with people who understand, even if in a lesser sense over smaller durations what it is that she's gone through._

She turned to Kori.

_We'll need to talk to Power Girl about this, too. If anyone can help her emotions...._

Kori blinked.

"You're right, girlfriend Raven, she could."

Death sat up, her wound healed, and gritted her teeth at the pain of slight motions from her clipped wing.

_**Those scratches must have been worse than I thought.** _

She shuddered.

**_Well, as nice as it is to know that there are people who do understand, and as saddening as that is likewise, there are things we must deal with._ **

Her clipped wing twitched again and she bit back a painful whine at the sharp spikes that surged through her. 

Her gaze turned to Raven, her face still gaunt and lined. 

_**You turned my power against me with the wards. Do you have a way that the power of life could awaken instead of the other?** _

Raven immediately shook her head and moved her hands rather frantically.

_Ah, no thank you. I've done enough of handling your function without the slightest idea of what I'm doing. What should happen is a way for you to regain control of it._

Death's eyes narrowed. Her anger briefly surged out and she snarled:

_**Fine words from the woman who has one of my own feather that lets you turn me into a lapdog.** _

Raven snorted.

_**OK, fair point. What needs to be done past this is....figuring out a way to strengthen you, one that won't hurt you or me. I have a bad feeling about how my demonic half would have set those command runes and the idea of protection for my team against your role, Death.** _

She clicked her teeth.

_**I wouldn't put it past that version of me to arrange that anything that hurt us too badly would rebound on you in the view that the concept of life and death could take anything we endured. I don't remember all of what was done, and neither does she, and we have to actually work together instead of being like brothers and sisters or cats and dogs and other natural enemies.** _

Death made a short, sharp bark.

_**Damned Scots, they ruined Scotland.** _

Raven did a brief double take, before shrugging. 

**_I think the simplest element here is to take this in two parts, and to aim to do the simpler. The two of you are not automatically natural allies, by any means, and seeking to prolong this will do no good for anyone, yourselves least of all. Your emotional issues, and no matter how much I lo-I care for you-_ **

Death's eyes widened at the first partial word, Starfire simply snorting in amusement and shaking her head slightly at Raven's softness-your issues aren't going to be fixed by some kind of magical one and done. That never works, it just creates a new cycle of failure and self-blame.

Raven's grin was more feral and it was no longer Raven who spoke but Pride.

**_That part will take time. Getting your being back into an even tilt, to a point that you can repair your wings, that's simpler in a way and yet not at the same time._ **

Her hand reached out to caress Death's cheek gently as Death leaned into it.

**_The damage I did to you is beyond your power to repair, and for that I am sorry. Lucifer here will be an insufferable bastard about it for at least a few million years. If he were different he wouldn't have Fallen and we'd be in this same fix with Raguel or Sandalphon instead. But that can be fixed._ **

She looked to Lucifer and Michael. **_Given her limits and mine, how long do you think?_ **

The two archangels shrugged. _Three days, maximum._ Michael's smile was confident, a change mirrored by the stoic expression on Lucifer's face.

Then they turned to Death and laid hands on her clipped, the fullness of their combined strength flowing into the damaged and ossified parts of the wing.

Raven and Starfire watched with rapt fascination, interrupted only by Michael looking to them. 

_**If you have a spell to contain dull pain you can think might help, might want to begin that preparation now.** _

The wince on Raven's face mixed her expressions and those of Pride, but both began the incantation in Old Azarathi, and as the combined power of the Angels unwove and unmade the ossified flesh, the sensation of restored sense and feel in the rest of her wing would have caused Death to spasm and then fall unconscious and near stiff as rigor mortis save that the soothing effects of Raven's spell and the emotions stirred by the partial word, and the sincerity in its use overwhelmed and allowed her to slide into what was the first genuine sleep she'd had in some billions of years.

 _ **Well then**_ , said Lucifer. **_Let her rest. We'll go tell the ah....team._ **

As the two angels, the half-demon, and the alien all left, Death's slumber was a peaceful and dreamless one, one that let her experience something she had so seldom experienced, save one short span of time when Lex Luthor had briefly granted her that most precious of things. While she rested, two things happened. The crack in the Source Wall widened and increased both its depth and its totality, exposing more of the entity slowly returning to life and to awakening. What had begun could not so neatly be undone, especially when Yuga Khan, who had been an essential part of keeping her, erupted from his containment and roared in a bellow of triumph that carried, from his divine nature, far into the vacuum of space. 

He summoned a Boom Tube, desiring to return to his homeworld.

For the first time in his life, too, Yuga Khan had no desire to tarry or to seek the deeper elements of the Source. The wall was breaking. _She_ was awakening, and beyond this, the dwellers in the Outer Darkness that the Wall contained were free to broach its bounds. He had not been a part of the confrontation against that entity that had sought to broach reality with the World-Tree but he had felt it, felt her presence far more intimately than most. The Wall was sundered, and in that power of sundering and in _who_ sundered it there were new names for him. Well, there was one new name, and one old one he had dismissed, in the form of the Black Racer, as now he had seen beneath the Racer, seen the entity that hid in that aspect in the realm of the New Gods for her power was such that the Racer was merely an avatar.

Anti-Life equation indeed, to grasp her and to make use of her would grant him greater power than his feeble minded spawn Uxas could grasp.

And there was the one that had found a lever to move her. A daughter of a being that had been his contemporary in his first surge of power, and this made him stop for a moment midst Boom Tube transport, a blink of an eye and yet a pause. The thing that his kind saw as the Racer had dispersed him then in a sudden display of power. A being that could more than contest with his kind as equals, dispersed with a single sudden assertion of will. Yes, he had been blinded.

At another level, the stars that had begun to become as frozen jewels of light that marked the implosion of reality began to burn again, slowly and by degrees, as reality began belatedly to correct elements of its changes.

The entity that slumbered in the Source Wall began to hear whispers, one soft and low and dulcet and one a towering thunderous sound that was of a nature like and unlike the forces of Apokolips, whispers in the dark and the vacuum of space that kindled a fire in her veins. It had been so long since the Source had placed her here, when she had sought to claim her mother's love. The voices echoed in the shadows and the returning to consciousness spread further as her power began to course through her body and the Wall that was shattering began to vibrate away.


	16. I Gave Them All Another Face and Another Name:

RAVEN'S DREAMSCAPE:

Memory dreams were not unusual things to Raven, not in her past, nor in her present. Very few of them until that day were positive, and her sleep had often been a haunt and a haven of nightmares. The most fearsome of her nightmares was a recurring figure who had mouths where eyes should be and was like Freddy Krueger's more deranged and murderous cousin. Those nightmares were simple enough for she became a greater demon, the Gem, and ensured that the figure she knew only loosely as the Corinthian moved to parts unknown, for a time.

The memory-dreams were plentiful and they were painful and she knew nothing but the uttermost terror whenever she'd had them. And then when Death of the Endless had crashed into her life and after, the last few years, she'd had no such thing. Dreams of peace and sometimes an erotic encounter with Death that had seemed very real and almost like she was tangibly in her apartment. She was never quite sure what to make of this but wise demons and wise anything did not seek the Lord Shaper unless he sought them to ask.

So when the memory-dream came upon her like a freight train in the night she did not have her usual means of preparation to deal with them.

_It did not begin as the true event did with the Noonday Darkness that plunged the Earth beneath alien skies of dead stars where nightmares had stalked for a time until a being of bone-hued skin clad in white finally tired of the intrusions into his domain and cast them free, the first sign of the entities that governed the concepts changing elements of what they did and how they did it when a crisis came._

_It began when the murdered starlight fell like fire from Heaven into the heart of Jump City in an arc of plasma-like light that devoured the Noonday Darkness, landing in the very heart of Jump City, at Murakami Street and Perez Boulevard. The impact gouged a crater in the ground and raised a vast column of smoke and shattered glass in buildings around for miles. The Titans had immediately teleported over, Raven's soul-self reaching out to take them with her and now a thing of gentleness and love instead of the coldness and fear that it had been, at least for the Titans. They arrived as the primordial foghorn bellow of challenge and triumph and wrath echoed and arrived amidst corpses of countless animals and amidst the death of every Psychic in Jump City save Raven herself, though this was not known at the time._

_The pillar of smoke was still there but within it there were two lights like murdered sons, at a height fitting that of Titano, not the kind of being they were used to facing. The lights began to move toward them and thunderous sounds followed, like the footsteps of a giant far larger, suiting the height of Godzilla rather than a being of Titano's scale. The footsteps likewise made the ground shake, and as the smoke parted they saw her-no, it. A being of malice and hunger that was the height of Titano, eyes gleaming with that same light that had burned clear through the smoke, metal flowing into her left hand like a liquid to form a great warhammer._

_The thing turned its gaze to them and spoke in a dual-voiced harmony of unnatural and eerie resonances, the softer and sultry voice overlapping with a fearsome thunder that was tectonic and other elements that were mixed metaphors in a sense but only together could describe as if by analogy the elements of the voice._

**_Mine the hands that heal, mine the hands that kill._ **

**_Mine the hands that stilled the wine-dark sea._ **

**_Mine the hands that set the stars to burn, mine is the lightning flash._ **

**_I am the Undying Flame, Azar, Goddess of the Temple Azarath. Am I not glorious to behold?_ **

_The last sentences in particular made Raven enraged, but she was not the one that moved forward first. Vic and Garfield did, Garfield become a Tyrannosaurus rex that bellowed in wrath while Vic charged his sonic cannons. An oddly short and staggered set of thunderclaps followed like a machine gun, almost, and it was only later that they realized this was the creature laughing. Then the Titano-sized monster did something still further shocking to them, and moved faster than Superman, only beneath the power of the Speed Force. Before the sound of the blow registered Vic was hurled into the skies and his beams blasted harmlessly into the atmosphere, and another blow knocked Garfield likewise into a skyscraper, the sweatdropping and eye-bugged-out Tyrannosaurid awed by the strength of the blow and its speed alike._

_Nightwing was next on the target list, the haft of the monster's hammer digging a second crater in the ground, its gauntlets on the hammer and the terrible hell-light blazing outward at Dick, who stood against it as the human against a force of terror that had no known nature and whose name was blasphemy. The eyes glowed more ferociously and Dick fell as a tree hewn and Starfire, enraged beyond words at the sight lunged forward only for that same speed to grasp her in a grip of iron, the creature holding her in her right hand and the great hammer in her left._

_**Come now, child. You, Gem of Trigon, are a spear of unyielding iron placed at the very heart of an unsuspecting world. Your father in his hubris deemed that only he, Angra Mainyu of the Malebolge, would be the one to wield such naked, merciless force. A spear is a weapon that may be wielded in any hand that seeks to master it, and so is it that I have mastered but one of your kind of spears. Others of your kind I have tested and there are but a few that are interesting. One clad in golden armor, one in the world they call Prime and which has none other to contest that claim. The one I have weaponized....and you.** _

_**You look upon your goddess in the flesh, girl, have you not been raised to be a loyal servant of my monastery? Kneel.** _

_"NO!" She shouted this in rage fueled by the horrid blasphemy of the creature, which only smiled in a savage grin at her with that light intensifying in its brilliance and the deadly hypnotism of that brilliance._

_**Very well.** _

_A flick of her wrist and she tossed Starfire into the air with a stre_ ngth that was awe-inspiring and strode toward Raven slowly and calmly, like a tsunami coming to shore and the light of her eyes holding Raven in mortal terror.

_**I am the Alpha and the Omega, Eldest and Fatherless, Firstborn of Chaos. Your multiverse built the Source Wall to keep beings like me out, and to keep the Old Ones in their slumbering dreaming-death and yet here I am, Azar the Undying Flame, the greatest and first and ultimate opponent of the demon Trigon.** _

_**Your counterpart in that other universe is the spade that delved beneath the wall, and I.....** _

_Then her gaze froze on Raven who saw a bewildering succession of images that in retrospect she recognized. Her first encounter with Death, her second, images that offered glimpses of the future yet proceeded in elements incomprehensible and awesome in their scale. A giant from the Source Wall, a being in a red sari preaching impossible elements as if she were Sister Blood and yet hiding something incomprehensibly worse and alien behind that. More times and encounters with Death who writhed beneath her and spoke three words that haunted her._

_**As you can see, the spade is not my preferred method. The sledgehammer is. And you, Raven daughter of Arella of Earth-48, have shown me the sledgehammer.** _

_The being now squatted near her, the hammer ripping great wounds in Jump City that still endured and could not be repaired aright._

_Her massive right gauntlet descended for her with a great hunger and she cringed and wept and prayed that this was not the true Azar her people had worshiped when six red beams fell like fire from Heaven on the creature's side. Superman, Supergirl, and Power Girl poured the heat vision on and the creature snarled and moved up, hurling herself at them with a stupendous speed as the rest of the League brought the Titans back from the skies and skyscrapers and from the depths of whatever trance they were placed under in the case of Richard. When Conner Kent joined the Superman family in the fight, it was in retrospect his first time as a Titan (and he certainly considered it thus)._

_The giant fought against three Kryptonians who swiftly stopped holding back for fear of a world of cardboard against a being perfectly capable of taking the blows, and they shared with the Titans and the rest of the League a ferocious battle fought for hours against a force of speed and power they could not grasp quite at the time, though the later call by the Earth first beset by the creature clarified much that was at this time obscure. At one point when the teams had been tossed aside the giant turned back for her and her body was gripped in the fist of a creature the size of Titano or King Kong and the weight of the malice was such that she exp-_

Then she was in a throneroom, vast and ornate and opulent. Not hurled against a street with sufficient force to shatter every bone in her body. In not merely a throneroom in dreamlands but _the_ throne. On that throne sat a being in ornately decorated white robes with dark eyes that gleamed like starlight, a being whose presence had Raven and Pride feeling more merged than they ever had before. And that being knelt as one before the Lord Shaper and kept her eyes on the ground, murmuring softly:

_Hail Lord Shaper, King of the Dreaming._

Dream's laughter was neither kind nor welcoming, not like Death's, but it did not display the malice she knew the lord of Nightmares and their author was perfectly capable of if suited him.

You fear me, do you not?

_Yes, Lord Shaper, I do._

**Good. You conquered my sister, made her yours, and you have her heart and her love, even if she is yet unwilling to admit this, let alone what it means. In this you are fortunate. You love the only Endless who can love and shed the blood of her kin, for she takes our shards at times with all of us where they have outlived their usefulness. If it were another of us you would be in her embrace by now. If you were any other who touched her in that way and dared to lay hands on her heart, she would have given you an embrace in tears and shunned us but it would have passed.**

Dream leaned forward on his throne.

**You are here because it _is_ you, the one demon, who could _not_ bring yourself to exploit beyond a point her in your grasp, and because that love of hers is given to one who can and will become a part of things that we did not anticipate.**

**I will not lie, however, and claim that we are not enraged. You are _fortunate_ that Delirium sees this as love, insofar as her nature allows her to see things and to be consistent. You are still more fortunate that _Desire_ has not taken action or interest in your ties to our sister, because I am known to be unkind, and yet she and I are....closer. Desire and my sister do not get along still less than Desire and I do. There is......a reason for that, and it is not so different to the thing that created that rift, save that it hurt Death worse. She has never told me what, precisely, Desire did that was so wrong, nor why it hurts her so. Desire is hurt by that too, but our sibling is more protective of our kin than i am. And you are deeply lucky that so far xie has not yet turned xir eye to you.**

Raven/Pride acknowledge the point with a stiff nod, Dream's smile marked with a stiff amusement at her expense.

Dream sighed.

**She has given you her heart and a key to understanding her many of us have wished and that all save Delirium, even Despair in her own way, envy. You are in a new kind of sphere now, Raven, daughter of Angela Roth. You had best get accustomed to this. Do you ponder why I sent to you that dream with the Kelzhandari abomination referring to you as a spear of unyielding iron?**

She blinked and then jerked her head.

_Yes, I do._

**You have the heart and the binding of a being who, if you wielded her as a weapon, could only be stopped by the Presence. Your family does not have the best record of handling such potential in your hands.**

_I know, Lord Shaper. I am not like my father, nor my brothers, nor the entity that spawned the Brothers Very Grim._

Dream's lip quirked.

**Indeed, but I showed you this as a reminder that you overcame the the very Goddess your earlier life oriented around and the truth of her being who and what she is, and your counterpart likewise overcame her intended role as that spear for the first time in her life. You have seen what it is to overcome this. She is vulnerable, she is exposed, and she is in the hands of one who may know less than others and yet next to you she is a babe in woods stalked by wolves ravenous and ready to devour with impunity.**

Raven nodded.

_I.....understand._

And it is that understanding that spares your life, and your presence.

With that she awoke in her room, startled. One did not readily forget statements from the Lord of the Dreaming in his kingdom and in his majesty.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM, TITANS TOWER:

It was Death who woke up first, relieved and refreshed after sleep and rest, something that she had not had in billions of years and as her power had waned, all she'd felt was the exhaustion but still the burden. Part of her felt empowered as much from this as anything else, and she was utterly un-self conscious about her nudity, not least from the charred and carbonized-seeming flesh that marked a diagonal from the underside of her chin to her left hip, and the scars on her arms and legs. She scratched her side absent-mindedly, and looked at Raven and Starfire fondly. Her brother had spoken to her in the Dreaming, holding her sigil and summoning her and it had not been a pleasant chat, about as pleasant as even a cursory interaction with Desire.

When Raven and Starfire awoke they went to shower as Death slid on her usual garb, intending to go to the infirmary while the Titans ate. The angel and the devil and she did not need to eat, fortunately, not as mortals did. It would be a very long and tiring day, in all probability, even if it was a good one. Her eyes followed Raven and Starfire's bodies with an amused possessiveness, and while they ate, she pondered that one of the warded areas was gone. The one that had held her blood that had been.....

Her hand slipped to her side from a kind of paranoia more that expected of a mortal than a being of her nature and she visibly 'breathed' in relief. The wound she had not known was there was gone. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was gaunt and she was achingly reminded of Morpheus and tears came to her eyes unbidden in the memory of her brother as he had been and she held herself for a moment while the two women whose fate now intersected with her own ate, and then they went to the infirmary together.

TITANS TOWER INFIRMARY:

Raven had offered to help her walk, and Death had let some of her inner temper flare, then. Raven, like others, had come to see her as the youathful being she seemed and not the ancient entity she in truth was. The display of her temper had rattled the tower and Death had determinedly walked with her umbrella like a cane. She was slower and much more laborious than otherwise, but it proved to her that she could walk on her own. That she privately deemed that she would return to the room with help was a thing locked behind her mind.

Raven and Starfire spent parts of the day with her and others living their own lives beyond her, which she did not begrudge them. The wounds on her arms and legs that were charred into her skin faded away and she felt the return of full sensation into those limbs with an exultant glee. The damage dealt to the rest of her went from a deep black that matched her hair and her lips to one that was greyer, a medium shade of grey that still contrasted, but nowhere near so totally, and she felt a strange blend of sensations both lovely and terrible. Lovely in that parts of her body that had had sensation by virtue of Raven's empathy and her touch but at no other point felt real again. Terrible in that the pain in her wing was matched by what was essentially a very powerful mystical equivalent to a third degree burn and to her surprise and hidden anger Desire had popped in, briefly, to hand Lucifer and Michael the same concoction that had dulled her pain earlier.

Dream, sweet, lovely, invulnerably self-centered Dream assumed their feud was about him and as much as she loved him, she was his sister. Her life and her functions did not and would not revolve around him. Even that day it had been xir bullying Delirium and their own feud that had amplified certain things. To owe Desire anything, let alone twice-over, and to have Desire's compassion stung as badly as it did with Lucifer, which was no doubt why Desire wielded it. That blend of cruelty-as-compassion underlaid so much and it poisoned their relationship and Death just......

Yet the concoction worked and the roaring inferno in her body cooled to merely an itching that would have overwhelmed other entities and left her fidgety. A change of pace from the aching void. It was a quiet moment and set of moments, the earlier clashes stilling into healing spaced out in a way that perhaps but one more day would see enough. It was hard for one as proud as she was to admit the need of and for help, but it worked in this case. It felt strange, and unnatural, after so long and outliving so many things and living through so much of the same things in the same ways. And yet, for the first time in an infinity of infinities, an emotion so strange to her that she did not recognize it for what it was began to flower.

Hope.

In ever so slight a fashion, and a means, she had shifted the endless monotony of lives that stacked on each other and the same bitter feuds and follies between her family just slightly.

TITANS ISLAND:

Zauriel and Mazikeen both had adjusted fairly well to the concept of guard duty. Ordinarily their lives would seldom intersect but where they would do so it would have been a violent, even explosive element. Once, Mazikeen had been of Zauriel's host before the Fall, before her transformation. A daughter of Lilith, who had been Zauriel's right hand. Then came the Great Revolt and all had changed. It felt good, at one level, to work together again but it was awkward. Neither dared expose their backs to the other and conversation had been slow, halting, fueled with gallows humor and with sharp and acidic barks of laughter. 

So far beyond the impacts of healing and the fortunate elements that the stars were unfreezing and burning again and elements of entropy were reasserting themselves, there were good things. No return of the Aesir either, which was still more fortunate, as the weapons that could hold against the combined power of the great leaders of both halves of the Sundered would make bloody rags of their subordinates. Instead there were patrols around the island, patrols in daylight and clouded over skies and in darkness beneath the gaze of the reviving stars.

Then the first of the lesser vermin manifested from the light of a Boom Tube, a being of gigantic stature clad in blue mail that was like a second skin, with protrusions in his chin like a bifurcated beard. He smiled coldly.

**That tower has something my lord wants. Do not stand in the way of Darkseid, lesser children of lesser gods.**

The only response from Zauriel was that he let his full light shine as he drew a blazing, burning sword, while Mazikeen drew both her blade and the hellfires that burned within her body and then in a single swift motion as in the old times each moved at the side of the other, only now it was not a drill but in active combat together, as on the day when Lucifer had defended Heaven against Mazikeen's own kin. Steppenwolf was awed when the smaller-seeming form of the Angel caught his axe in its full glow with force sufficient to rock his bones within his arms, moving him back with sufficient force from the recoil that he staggered.

The demoness cut him with the knife and the cut in his mail was followed by a sudden release of hellfires that burned and it was not the kind of burning that was usual on Apokolips, but then he smiled in turn.

**I am a scion of Apokolips, brother to Yuga Khan himself. It takes more than fires of the realm of a departed king to halt me!**

The axe swung again and again but each time the angel met the strikes with enough strength that the recoil kept him off-balance. The fires of Hell burned but he was mightier than they, even if his armor was getting an annoyingly high amounts of slits in it. As he raised the axe once more, unknown to him, Yuga Khan made plantefall on Apokolips and Uxas, his nephew and the absolute master of that world called him back in a sudden spasm of fear.

 _Well, that was easy,_ murmured Zauriel.

Mazikeen's eyes narrowed. **Too easy.**

LOBDELL'S BAR AND GRILL:

Slade Wilson slumped at the bar, nursing his booze.

The pity of having a healing factor was that if one wanted to get a great ripping drunk one had to work at it so much that it was like work, not fun.

He'd encountered no less than the Devil and John Constantine had healed him before departing for parts unknown. The Titans were facing some manner of horror far worse than he could ever be, and he wished them the full joy of it. He had felt and witnessed elements of that power, and seeing the glimpses of just what kind of being had so briefly ensnared him did not instill him with greater confidence.

He hated Lobdell's with a passion, the food was mediocre and overly greasy, the floors were filthy and the bathrooms looked like the Joker's idea of an arts project.

But it had the strongest booze in Jump City, and the only kind that could get him drunk when he wanted to be, and by God, he wanted to be drunk as Hell.

He didn't notice the door opening, nor the black-haired man who looked around and snorted, shaking his head, and made comments in Chaucerian English about how much this was old home times.

He strode up to the bar, ordered in more modern English with an indecipherable accent a very strong drink himself, and then looked over at Deathstroke.

"What's troubling you, mate?'

"Made a deal with the Devil and barely got out of this one without being rebuilt as a fucking zombie."

"Oh you're that sorry son of a bitch. I remember you. It was from that day when everything but me turned to stone and I had her for company, funnily enough."

"Her?"

"The not-so-Grim Reaper. Abby Sciuto's perpetually ever-young counterpart with the boop-snoot of doom."

"Oh. Oh right. Her. Yes. I remember. I did not expect the incarnation of Death to look like....that."

"Nobody does, friend. Tell you the truth I thought she was love, at first."

"Why are you here? And don't call me friend." 

"Very well, Mr. Wilson. I'm here to confirm that one of my more unpleasant acquaintances, General Immortus, is in fact no longer a troublesome factor. Damn Wallenstein never did know when to quit."

"Well I can confirm that much, but...."

Hob smirked.

"I'll be honest, as soon as the stuff with the angels blows over, I'm going to that big T-shaped building to get my answer from the horse's mouth."

"If you're one of Immortus's contemporaries, why aren't you just there now?"

"Only thing unique about me is that Death herself granted me immortality for as long as I wish. That and not one but two friends. Her and Dream. I don't have a prayer of avoiding taking her embrace if I do that and if I wanted that that easily I wouldn't be here where I am now."

"Huh. You realize that if not for the literal presence of winged cosmic David Bowie showing me that Trigon isn't the Devil, quite, the way I thought he was that I'd not believe you to be anything but a crazy drunk."

"Of course." He smiled with a roguish and somewhat sinister grin. "Who would believe that the person mistaken for the Wandering Jew would be anything but the very model of modern sanity?"

Slade Wilson laughed, and then relaxed, and the two began to swap war stories.

RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

That night Death went over to Raven with an aggression that stunned her, holding the daughter of Trigon down with one hand, Raven's strap-on against her pussy. Death did not usually assert her strength in this way, for she preferred in truth that her seeming image be taken as more truthful to reality than it was. Raven had shown her a deeper truth. She had been able to shift the pattern, and she wanted to give Raven something of hers, something of a gift. Raven did not question that strength nor the eagerness with which Death kissed her, nor that even when weak it was easy for her to take another shape and to kneel between Starfire's legs and bend down, her lips pressing to Starfire's pussy with a deep kiss that had Starfire biting her hips and placing her hands on Death's head. Her grip was firm, and immensely strong, pleasure fueling her power no less than righteous fury.

Death, even weakened, could easily take physical pressures that were only this, and let herself go giving Starfire's labia careful licks and coaxing out her clitori, of which she had three in different places. The other-her on top of Raven hissed in delight as her hands gripped the headboard of Raven's bed with strength sufficient to deform the wood and Raven slid into her, and her eyes of flowing darkness met eyes of shining violet.

 _ **Do it,**_ she growled, the growl tectonic, objects on her bookshelves vibrating with the impact.

Shadows began to flow in the room with eyes upon eyes upon eyes and mouths that gnashed and snarled and echoed in shadowy moans.

Death looked around her with a feral excitement, the grin on her face for a moment mirroring a being that Raven had encountered in the clash with the monster that haunted her memory-dream the prior night. For but a moment her eyes had the golden sun-effect of Desire's, but that moment passed and Death began to blur with motion that reminded Raven that of Death's earlier statement:

_**If I had the mentality of Zeus on such things, what would have stopped me?** _

The answer, as both Raven and Pride, who surged into the ascendancy when the blurring increased and the friction burns began to smell like actual burns as her sheets caught fire from the motion (something Pride dispelled with a blink) found out was....

Nothing.

Not that they particularly minded, not the sensations, nor the sounds and what was and wasn't smells. Nor the heady rush of realizing that after everything, after all the changes and heartache and wonders that had already ensued, that this was what Death made of them and with them. She may or may not have any feelings for Starfire, but Raven, whose vision could barely keep up with Death tapping into some of her more fundamental elements as an Endless even with the fullness of Pride's power augmenting her own already-considerable advantages on such things, saw and felt the empathic-physical overlap and it was a heady thing that left her vaguely coherent and floored.

She knew that the strapons she had could and did run risks of things like impregnation on the wrong timeframe, but she had no worries about this with Death, nor the extra insurance she had when she wielded this with her fellow superheroines. She had no objections to the ideas of becoming a parent, and a great deal of hope that if she did she would be a better parent than Angela Roth or Trigon the Terrible had ever managed. To be fair it was easier to be that than a mother forbidden by their mutual religion to be one and a father whose idea of parenthood was daddy's little squirt, so that was so low a bar that merely raising her kid with a halfway decent morality and a family life that would only pay for a therapist's kids' extracurricular activities would qualify as a massive improvement.

Thus the lapse on the wards shielding others from consequences was of no consequence, and the imagery and power of Death asserting her will was such that she understood all too easily how a fictional character she'd derided (until that day when the Avengers and the other teams of that universe had proven all too real and so too had Thanos of Titan) had fallen in love with a depiction of Death who resembled her so much that she was still tempted to sue George Perez for libel. She was not a mass murdering psychopath who slaughtered worlds for the enjoyment of it, but she admitted it. She loved Death, and that awareness filtered into Death's own emotions and backwards and the loop became like a fog that concealed them all in a sense of something that transcended comprehension.

They fell asleep together, Death between them both, her clipped wing no longer hurting to a point that she could not afford to fold it by her side. This was not something she noticed then, falling asleep with the sweaty bodies of Raven and Starfire close with her, her emotions and body overwhelmed with just......everything about this.

She would, however, have seen more than a slight degree of at least suspicion, if not concern, at the double take of Destiny of the Endless, whose gaze turned to the book in front of him, and the curiosity of her brothers at the feeling that rippled out in Destiny's maze, where they were quite enjoying themselves in spite of their expectations.

THE RUINS OF THE TEMPLE AZARATH:

As the Source Wall corroded further, a change struck a realm that had been dead since the Terror of Trigon laid it low and left his daughter as its last survivor and sole heir. Nothing lived in Azarath, its fires cooled and its shattered paradise a realm of bones. In the endless silence and decay-less element of Azarath, the desolate shattered towers that gleamed with witch-light began to turn ivory and gold and the bones seemed to literally sink deep into the material fabric of the Temple, as the fires to the Goddess Azar lit with a new light, the absent Goddess at last heeding the prayers of her followers, knowing that Trigon had been dispersed such that he could never return.

On the seat that had been the near-goddess and her own high priestess's, a new body began to form, clad in a sari the hue of blood, with hair platinum blonde, and a smile that crossed from ear to ear. Her gaze looked into the scrying pools of old Azarath, finding the Earth. The awakening one had heard the tales that would see one element of the future turn.

Her eyes turned further to Earth, and to the memory of the ease with which her priestess had lured others to create the incarnation of the Angra Mainyu with the seductive promise. A world without sin and suffering and immortality in truth as defined by the soul. The body took shape anew, and the golden deathlessness of Azarath became a harder and more terrible light, the Temple reshaping itself into a great throneroom, the combined skulls of the inhabitants reshaped into a vast throne.

Too, her gaze turned to the realm beyond the Doors of Night through which one of the monks had tried to cast the infant Raven only to be burned to ashes by the light of Trigon's eyes. A giant of magma was crossing through the realm between the worlds, striding inexorably to the nexus placed not on the western coast of the United States, but in the very heart of Asia, near the tomb later erected in honor of the fallen conqueror, Timur.

She smiled, coldly. 

_**What fools these mortals be.** _


	17. Whats Puzzling You is the Nature of My Game:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven goes to the Malebolge and to the thrones of Hell to settle the affairs of her circle, and for a difficult talk with her brothers. 
> 
> The Endless meet for a conclave, and Highfather of New Genesis has a most unusual refugee turning up at the doorsteps of his palace in the Celestial City.

THE MEETING HALL OF THE ENDLESS:

The Endless had received the summons of Destiny in the wake of Death's last attempt to free herself, and it had taken time for those willing to answer the call to answer it. One by one they arrived, Destiny first, stoic, and his eyeless face gazing at his book. Next slouched in Despair, her fanged face a stoic mask as she ripped at herself with her hooks and took her seat at the end of the table. Not long after her strode in far more boldly Desire, in xir more androgynous face, wearing a red sleeveless shirt that exposed the genderfluid form xir took. Xir golden eyes were bright but worried.

Next walked in Dream, whose face was dour and whose manner displayed both concern and in the regular wary gaze at Desire and sitting well away from his sibling.

Delirium flew in as a bird before reasserting her own shape and seated on the other side to Desire and Despair, and her eyes roved around the room. All waited, for a time, hoping that Death had recovered enough to answer the summons for the conclave.

When the feeling of another Endless returning led to hope, they were genuinely stunned when a great bear of a man with a red ponytail and a thick beard strode in, dropping his sword rudely.

 **Don't get any ideas** , Destruction raised his hand. **I am not retaking my function, I am not returning permanently. Our sister has gotten herself in a fair bit of trouble, and absent someone who can mediate between us the rest of you would squander your time in arguments and the old feuds and nothing good would happen. Until she returns, I am here. And I will remain for one conclave after, so she at least gets a chance for us to...........have a talk we never did have and now, I suspect, she will be willing to have it.**

Destiny nodded.

_We are all here, then. I begin this conclave of the Endless._

_WhY iSn'T sHe HeRe?_ Delirium's question was half forgetful and half flavored with a very real worry. 

**She cannot be here, sister** , spoke Destruction gently. **Whatever happened to her on Earth means that her realm remains lit by a light not of our making and she cannot maintain it.**

Their eyes turned to him. For a time, and it is unknown to any of us save perhaps you, I suspect, Brother Destiny, our eldest sister cannot go to her own realm. It is barred from her, and even her apartment is.

The other Endless shifted.

 ** _How can that be if she still has her sigil?_** Dream's question was wary, the memory of the AI Wan that had caused such a ruckus in his realm clear. Death had no such contingency plans for their elder sister had never really entertained needing them, but that memory in turn left the Endless

Destruction shrugged. _Hell if I know. It means nothing good, that's for sure. It also means a realm that very few of us can access is open for the presence of any bold enough to try to take it or to make it their own._

Desire stirred. _**The creature calling itself Nekron, perhaps?** _

_No, I don't think he'd dare. He is a parasite feeding off of her energy, he would risk himself too much if he tried. Hell is the most valuable real estate on the ethereal planes, but the Sunless Lands, the nexus that connect the Afterlives and permit going to and fro to all of them? When their mistress is absent and marooned on one of the Earths of the multiverse?_ Destiny's statements were surprisingly musing and less decisive than usual.

_I am glad that you have returned, even for a short time, Brother Destruction._

Despair spoke softly. **We have all.....missed you.**

Destruction smiled, softly, and put his hands on her shoulder as he stood and paced around the table.

 **So what do we do, then? Leave her on that world?** His questions were harsh, belligerent, and yet the ease of his manner and the simple novelty of his presence left the other Endless less shaken by this than they expected. 

_No, she will find her way off of it, in time. She is weakened, brother. If we fall beneath a point we cannot sustain the burden of our realms. I do not know, brother. Only one among us, up to this point, has been able to cast off elements of his function-and their eyes turned to Destruction, who simply nodded and did so with a face of iron stoicness-otherwise, we have died or been held captive-and their eyes turned to Dream. This is a new situation for us, and we shall have to adjust as we do. Her function has not ended, even if she cannot reach her realm, the souls of the dead are......gathering in another place._

Delirium perked up.

_HeR AparTMenT?_

_Yes._

_I reMeMBer NoW. LiKe WheN ThE HeLL pEoPLe cAmE ThERe_.

_Yes. Enough of her is free to move that they are taken there, until she can take them to the Lands. That will hold, for now. Her apartment is.....massive, much moreso than it seems at first._

His gaze turned to Desire. _Very like your realm, sibling._

Desire huffed, crossing xir arms.

**_I still don't see why we can't punish the alien and the demoness that put their paws on our sister. She went to them when she was vulnerable and the empath in particular sho-_ **

Destiny interrupted xir abruptly, with a coldness that left Desire feeling very small and silent. 

_Of all of us, sibling, you should have the least to say about the personal affairs of others and how they choose to handle them. We remember the incident with Killala, and when Death and the Ivojya of Muspell were caught in your patterns as well. You have alienated two of your siblings beyond repair, do not seek to expand that to all of us with more ill-considered actions._

The rest of the Endless froze for a moment, stunned at Destiny's losing his temper and that their eldest brother was even capable of such emotions, even Destruction gazing in stupefied shock. Then Destruction laughed uproariously.

**I didn't know you had it in you, brother. You always were such a starch-arse.**

Destiny's look, even from an eyeless face, was as stony as his statues but the moment of tension was defused as it had been in the old times. And for a moment, the memory and the nostalgia of this time overwhelmed the Endless, and they unbent enough, briefly, to be as a family again.

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN's BEDROOM:

Death looked at her, flesh still mottled with a great grey mark across her neck and what was visible of her belly at least up to her hips. As with the other morning she woke up wearing little, in this case nothing. She was entirely comfortable with it, Raven and Starfire having no visible hesitations or invisible (for Raven's empathy was very much a thing she could sense in the wake of her binding, and that was growing with time. She was not entirely sure she liked this, or if it was simply a result of other things that she, who had so little context bar something very ancient, predating Dream and Killala. It didn't much matter) where her body's....changes...were concerned. They liked her, and wanted her, for her and that too was...unusual.

Raven had told her where she was going and old bad memories surged in her mind and she felt tears starting to form, biting back hyperventilating.

**_I know I'm getting better and all, but I'm not well enough to go with you or otherwise I would._ **

Her hands clenched and unclenched, an eye twitching slightly.

_**The last time someone I cared about went to see the ruler of Hell it ended badly.** _

Tears sparked in her eyes with light like that of the stars.

_**Please come back to me and come back safely. I lost my brother, I don't want to lose you, too.** _

And then she hugged Raven in a grip so powerful that Starfire would have envied it, Raven merely taking it and holding Death back firmly, pressing a light, chaste kiss on her lips.

_**I'll be back, lovely. Just..focus on healing.** _

She began to summon white energy of a different kind of potency and then vanished in a brilliant flash of light.

Death dressed herself hastily and somewhat slovenly, not fully zipping up her pants and leaving one of her straps down across her shoulder, but was too shaken and distracted by her memories to really care, and since she was who she was, others noticed but were especially careful not to say anything (not that she noticed nor cared either way).

TITANS TOWER INFIRMARY:

Death made her way to the infirmary with limbs trembling, if less overtly so than before, and the healing proceeded apace, her mood pensive and distracted. She knew that she could not feel the Sunless Lands, and she knew that the rest of her was able, at least, to take the souls of the dead to her apartment, which they/she had transformed into a vaster realm suitable to one of the Endless and what others expected to see. That much was a relief. There were not very many of them across Existence, either. Only a very small number of the very elderly and the weak.

She focused and realized to her shock that nothing had been born in the last.....three years, not the greater nor the lesser forms of life. That which relied on bacteria was relying not on the processes of nature but of supernature, of the unpredictable and capricious intervention of higher forces, the New Gods, those of the Old Gods that endured, and the very Source himself. Death gulped, slightly. The atrophying of the path of the dead was just one half of her function breaking down, the absence of new life told, too. Some women had been accursed with a three-year pregnancy, not merely in one world, but across all fifty-one major worlds and their hypertime strands.

In point of fact, all pregnancies in this timespan were like this, Death realized with a stoic look on her face. Bacteria were frozen in place, viruses that would otherwise have been fatal were perfectly survivable.

Her hands kept clenching and unclenching and she was especially waspish to Lucifer, who noticed and became waspish back, though she wasn't really paying attention that much, until Lucifer snapped his fingers right next to her left ear and she turned to him with a gaze of such anger that he froze. She was beneath his power, as was Dream, but far closer to him than Dream was, and if it came to the end of all things, he knew that she would take him to the Sunless Realms in the end and outlive him. That meant that while he could be (and was) hostile enough to speak sharply to her, he was still wary.

Then he made the mistake of asking where Raven was and Death told him and his eyes widened and then narrowed. _That_ made sense. Dream still existed, if.....changed. So she could not blame him, not in the same way, especially when he did not blame her any more than when she took his other facets.

Yet it had been his visit to him in his throne that had sparked the path of events where she'd taken him, and seen all that would follow with it, and for it, and he knew that very intimately, and knew how deeply she regretted that. He had forgotten just how angry and bitter Death could be when the mood was right. No further words were spoken by anyone, Michael remaining professional and even giving him the courtesy not to ask much in the way of questions, though it wasn't in truth that Michael _needed_ to ask such questions for Michael knew much more than he let on.

Dream and Desire were not allies, not by a wide margin. but they both reacted to events with a different way than she did.

He suspected, in the wake of the revelation and the shift in understanding of her that had just.....been there, that there may be more to it than he expected. It both awed and horrified him to realize that the most hidden speculation was true and that there was a being whose existence went back to the first creation, who'd seen the monsters that dwelt in the past in their glory and had taken them. To her, as to his own knowledge, the current Presence, Elaine, and her predecessor, his father, were but one in a string of creators and not the one who'd made her.

There were secrets and depths in those eyes of endless fluid darkness, and emotions that he could not place, and that made perfect sense. She predated him by orders of magnitude he could not fathom. Perhaps there had been more than one of them and perhaps there was more to it than he suspected. She was, after all, a very beautiful woman and he was never a friend or an ally of the Endless, especially Destiny and Dream. The idea of humiliating them both by conquering their sister had occurred to him but he'd never had the guts to try it. But perhaps, in the past, he had. That animosity was personal, and it was far moreso than merely being the cause of the death of Dream alone could explain.

And he, for all else that he was, lacked the courage and the will to ask her. She knew that but to his further surprised she did nothing to provoke anything further, not even a derogatory sniff in looking at him, merely remaining mute.

MALEBOLGE: 

Raven had last been here when a wrenching light had torn her soul asunder and led to her first meeting with Death, brief as that had been, and with her older brother Destiny of the Endless. Then she had been kept in a special place within the circle reminiscent of the church where Sebastian Blood, who had yet to go to Zandia and then to the HIVE Academy and then back to Zandia, had invoked her father in a rite he'd intended merely to draw his fathers in an act of ritualized debauchery and murder. As with Burgess before him he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams (pun intended, she reflected).

Now the place was.....inchoate, in parts. The bulk of people who dwelt within its environs included throngs of the damned, and the vast network of trenches that gave the place something akin to the First World War battlefields she'd seen in history books were elaborately organized and divided with the mixtures of the flaming Horrors, the Guardians, and the most powerful of the creatures of the kindred of their father therein. It was....inchoate, like the Dreaming had been in that time before her birth. Yet the very reality of its trenches meant that only the very most foolhardy among other lords of Hell-planes would have dared attacks.

When she stepped in, the realm's inchoateness had changed, it became anew a place of hard lines lit by foul fires, encircling the vast icy pit of the Ninth Circle, where the Lords of Hell held their thrones. Three years ago she, daughter of Angela Roth of Gotham City, a woman of Hakka descent who'd been adopted by the Roth family, of the birth-lineage of the Hongs (Raven remained disconcerted that her distant cousin of 160 years ago had led one of history's largest and bloodiest wars, and that she thus had monsters on both sides of her family*) had destroyed Trigon the Terrible, and under the laws of succession of the Malebolge had become its new ruler in all other manners of laws of succession. She had never sought a throne, and if this incident with Death hadn't chosen to come back to haunt her, her brothers would have.

She could not afford to have this hanging over her head when the incident with Death was very far from done, nor could Hell in truth endure having one of its most powerful planes left vulnerable.

When she had gone here, she had merged with Pride again, absent the power of the Endless, and the power and nature of her heritage had flowed through her in a way that defied simple terms even to herself. The power she had wielded to remake the world, it was hers all the time if she wielded it but she could veil this and even in a kind of weaponized denial act at a level beneath the kind of continual pulling of every single motion the Kryptonians had to do. No longer, when she returned now....she mused. She was basically in the unenviable position of a being of Chaos made to be one of Order, and in that contradiction and innate clash of things there was power.

After a walk that might have taken minutes, hours, or centuries, she arrived at last at the great throne. The Kings of Hell had sent an emissary to her, waiting.

 ** _Neron,_** she sneered.

 **The Queen in the Tower** , he sneered back. **The Kings call to you. You are here, you obey their summons.**

He grumbled about this but she elected not to hear him, as did Remiel and Duma.

GARDEN OF DESTINY:

Destiny of the Endless appeared before the Sons of Trigon, his book open and the three froze.

_You may return to your realm now, its fate is to be decided. One question. Were your sister to take the throne, would she call upon your loyalty?_

The Sons of Trigon laughed. **_Absolutely. The throne is hers by right. We intended her to take it or to yield it to Ruskoff there permanently. If she takes it it goes to the one who took it as it must be taken. So much the better._** Ruskoff dope-slapped Skuge for the irreverent reference to the nominal King and Skuge's gaze was one of malice.

Destiny snapped his fingers and the three demons were gone in a flash of light.

THRONES OF HELL:

They materialized before the twin angels, Duma and Remiel, and their sister.

She stood not in the white garb of herself as the superhero, but the leotard and armor on her thighs and the clawed gauntlets+ of a ruler of the Malebolge.

Sister, Ruskoff spoke for the three of them.

She responded with a simple nod.

Scions of the Malebolge, we are here to arbitrate who shall take the throne of your realm. By conquest, it belongs to your sister Pride. By custom it has fallen to Ruskoff, eldest of the children of Trigon.

Their gaze turned to Raven, whose face was as stoic as her ideal self wished it could be and held up well before the two Kings of Hell.

So tell me then, daughter of Trigon, what is your decision?

Raven stood up proudly and seemed to swell in stature as her father had done before her.

I am the Queen of the Malebolge, by right and by its laws.

The angels nodded, Remiel continuing to speak.

Such has it ever been, so ever shall it be.

THE MALEBOLGE:

The realm that had been atrophying was now back to its clean lines and raw power of her father's time and yet stronger, in a sense. Their father had been an ancient being of chaos and unbridled lust whether in physical or non-physical form, consumed by the failure of his first great bid for power and seeking to replicate the feat indefinitely until he'd brought forth his three sons and his youngest child, his daughter. Raven was more clinical, austere, her power on a more rigid line of form and function.

_**You do not have rule here directly all the time, sister, but you must be here in this realm some of the time.** _

Raven nodded.

_After the chaos that's followed from this incident with the Endless settles, I shall spend a time here full-time as a queen regnant. Our father did not rule this place from his throne nor did he remain here directly all the time._

Her brothers nodded.

**So be it. Our thanks, sister.**

She nodded in turn and her gauntlet clasped her brother's hands. She then paused before summoning the light of her changed powers.

_There are other reasons why I must return to Earth and to the realms beyond the Kingdom of Remiel and Duma._

She pointed to a realm within the pool of blood used for scrying.

_The fires of Temple Azarath are burning again, and it is rebuilt. Were it the people I would be there, not here._

Her brothers froze.

**_So what's rebuilt the fires?_ **

_I don't know. I know what I hope it is not, though I do not know what it is._ Then in a flash of light as bright as the sun or an atom bomb, she vanished, reappearing in Titans Tower.

PALACE OF NEW GENESIS, CELESTIAL CITY:

When the Boom-Tube opened near his palace, Izaya Highfather had reacted immediately to the presence of Darkseid with a wariness bordering on overt hostility.

Yet it was not the proud and brutish Uxas who strode toward him, but one with broken arms and a shattered jaw, and traces of a power that had been....

 _Yuga Khan,_ he gasped. He's free again. _Then that means she'll be free, too. Curse it._

His fists clenched and then he went to speak to Uxas, who simply spoke, with Grail and a few others of his advisors by his side and shaken:

**I beg for asylum, and then to regain my kingdom.**

Then Uxas fell on his face and the sight of Darkseid, personification and embodiment of Tyranny, fallen on his face before him left him disconcerted.

So too the sight of Steppenwolf kneeling before him in humility, and Grail not kneeling quite, but bowing formally.

_Very well. Enter freely and of your own will. Where is Kalibak?_

**My brother fought to shield us from Yuga Khan, sighed Grail. I presume that he's dead now. So's Grayven, not that anyone except Grayven would miss him.**

Highfather clicked his teeth. She did have a point and not even he was going to pretend otherwise. 

APOKOLIPS:

Newly enthroned in Armaghetto, Yuga Khan savored the irony that his son, mighty and proud as he was, had fled like a whipped cur.

He's just a little son of a bitch anyway, mused the Khan. His gaze turned to the one grandson that had fought like a lion to keep his father's line of retreat secure. Kalibak the Cruel was physically monstrously strong, the only one among the New Gods who had been able to deal him palpable harm. Grail had fled likewise, taking a scythe that could harm Gods, more's the pity. Grayven? He'd just stepped on that one like a cockroach and nothing of value had been lost there. Kalibak had hurt him, genuinely hurt him, and had fought with a loyalty deserving a better source.

Kalibak was being tended to, under the most direct and cruel orders not to challenge his will, by Granny Goodness, who was restoring him to health after the blows Yuga Khan had dealt him.

The Khan sat on his throne, gaze extending outward. He had been freed by the power of a being he had often otherwise ignored. The Seven, the concepts.

**Anti-Life Equation, my son? Too unimaginative.**

His gaze turned to the Earth. There were two beings there that offered him something new. Not so much mastery of the Source as a heft that if he sought that knowledge, would enable him to have not one but two offerings to intern in the Wall in his place. He, after all, was one of the New Gods and immortal and even the Wall could not confine him as a Celestial Giant forever. If Death of the Endless was interned in his place, it made no difference to him, or to his kind.

For now he had to familiarize himself with the deeper changes that had occurred. He had been out of the course of events for some tens of millennia, and there was much to catch up on now that he'd returned, again, and much more permanently.

Too, he knew that _she_ was poised to break from the Wall where he'd kept her restrained, though no matter what happened with the self-proclaimed Daughter of Death it would rebound to his advantage so he was one of the few entities in Existence who had nothing to fear and everything to gain. That though made him smile in a cold and unkind fashion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *2003 Raven and Arella are Asian, appearance-wise, so I'm going here with the same headcanon I apply to other worlds where she has the 2003 appearance, blending elements of the Wolfman-Perez background in with the rest. Raven's distant cousin is Hong Xiuquan, God's Chinese Son, and leader of the Taiping Tanguo. 
> 
> +Raven's garb as the elite and ruler of the Malebolge is heavily based on her Injustice: Gods Among Us appearance.


	18. The Superhuman Crew:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Morningstar and the Demiurgos finish healing Death, and Zauriel and the other Angels take their leave, as does Mazikeen. 
> 
> Decisions are made, Death tries to return to her realm, and Hob Gadling arrives at Titans Tower.

TITANS TOWER INFIRMARY:

Death looked at herself, briefly clad only in her pants. No remaining traces of the grey, and full feeling in her body, if dulled by the concoction of Desire that let her have the time to process the new/old sensations and to make decisions with them and through them. She clenched and unclenched her fists, taking a deep breath of relief, and looked to them with a smile.

**_Thank you._ **

It hurt to say that at one level, especially to Lucifer, but he seemed both thoughtful and to her surprise even worried. When that worry started to shift her eyes narrowed and the shift vanished immediately and a small quirk of her lips was all she allowed in response to that change. He might lord it over her later, but not here.

 _You should be able to regrow the feathers in all cases, except perhaps here,_ spoke Michael, who pointed at the second feather where the command-feather had been removed.

Death nodded, still sighing in relief at the privilege of being able to fold her wings against her without the immense pain flowing through her. Everything was relative, she reflected, with simple and unoriginal thought that nonetheless in the wake of an event that had terrified her seemed far more profound than it really was. There was a basic giddiness and relief at one level, and the old practiced element of refusing to think about or accept unpleasantness past a point. She knew the being, her self-proclaimed (and in part actual given her Ankh had struck the wall in its formation and the energy in that ankh was hers and her power at its rawest and the combination...) was going to break loose and shit was going to hit the fan.

Reality had come near to total unraveling again, and she left new messes, no doubt, that were yet undiscovered and yet their consequences no less grave. She would cross that bridge when she came to it and not one second or thought further. But.....she had recovered enough that it would not unravel altogether. Part of her felt an aching disappointment that her survival meant that she'd squandered another opportunity to see how truly immortal she really was. That was a small part, smaller still in the wake of the reminder why she kept taking this burden and put herself, and Existence, through this.

To the surprise of the Demiurgos and the Morningstar she even gracefully hugged them both, and they returned it, before taking their leave to return.

The superheroes, minus Zatanna and Doctor Fate were flummoxed still at the meeting with such entities and finding out that not only were they real but that there were entities that truly did live up to the title of God with a capital G. Darkseid was fearsome, but he was not quite like those two entities. Zauriel had not lied, most of them realized, the ones who'd met him. The others who hadn't knew that now there truly were angels as well as demons and regretted deeply that they'd wished an angel or two would have descended to help fight Trigon back in the day. If they had, would Earth still exist?

TITANS ISLAND:

Zauriel looked to the Demiurgos, as he strode toward him. 

They nodded to each other, and with a wistful sense of nostalgia and a wish that this would not be an exception to the Morningstar and to Mazikeen. To their surprise that nostalgia was heavier in the Morningstar than usual, though none quite were willing to admit it nor to the fullness of just how strong it actually was.

In a flash of light the angels departed for the Silver City, the demons in a burning blaze of Hellfire. Now that this was over, they were going to pay a vision to Yeshua, who after all was a master bartender among the other elements of his powers. They could use a good stiff drink to match anything in the Lux. But first, of course, there was the necessity to report to the Presence.

TITANS TOWER MEETING ROOM:

Next it was the Justice League's turn to depart, hugs exchanged and the teams, now more familiar with each other, looking at each other in full seriousness. The League had its own affairs and villains to manage and while Jump City's underground had largely gone underground since the incident where Control Freak had encountered the Morningstar, that would not hold and it was only a matter of time to see which of them would bite first. For a time, though, even Gotham City was remarkably crime-free, the three instances where the Earth had rocked on its foundation and only been saved by the most powerful of the superheroes instilling both humility and a simple gratitude to be alive even in the Rogues in Arkham.

It was a blissful fourteen days, though it would not last long and unknown to the people on Earth there were other factors that were drawing into play that appeared by Boom Tube in the League's meeting room and were content to wait for them to arrive.

The teams were relieved that for all the property damage (which was itself easy to set to rights with the more powerful heroes proving adept at doing so from regular experience) very few people had died, and no less so here than the mayor of Jump City.

The nature of the new guest at Titans Tower was not publicly disclosed for a time, though members of the occult groups worldwide knew immediately who she was and grasped something of the basic nature of what had driven the Aesir to Jump City to begin with. Most of them decided they were as well content to not only allow the Titans to deal with the mess but decided to move from the state of California, and indeed the entire western coast of the Western Hemisphere, in response, believing the Aesir would be back and absent the convenient presence of the two beings whose collective power was equal to the Presence, things would become much hairier.

Only Raven and Starfire noticed when Death held her sigil and seemed to fade from sight, Death deciding to try to check on her realm, and to do at least something to try to restart elements that were held in the strange suspension of what had gone before.

THE SILVER CITY, THRONEROOM OF THE PRESENCE:

The Presence herself was on her throne, seated upright, in a position more regal than usual.

Yet it was the human she had been, the woman Ellaine Belloc, who smiled at her uncle and Zauriel.

_**Well done, good and faithful servants, you have more than exceeded my expectations.** _

_Life and death haven't returned to normal yet._

_**That is not your task, nor is it mine. It is in the hands of the Endless whose domain it is to restart her realm and her power.** _

_And the breaking of the Source Wall?_

**_Perpetua is a parasite created as the collateral damage of Death's last suicidal ideation phase. She is powerful by the standards of mortals and lesser entities, but if she goes too far, back in the Source Wall she'll go and I'll send her there. Personally._ **

Her smile was as sunny as her light as she continued: **_My predecessor did that before and it was essentially the multiverse's biggest bitch slap and in the Wall she went, with the first King of Apokolips as the seal that held her there. He's free too, and I suspect that he'll think himself able to face the Endless that created a multiverse-creating monster by throwing her sigil out of the Endless halls right into the Wall. And he will not let himself think about what such an accidental use of that power means for a deliberate one as he's not the brightest of the New Gods, merely the strongest._ **

The Presence laughed, a silvery and merry tone.

**_For the mortals this is going to be out of the frying pan, into the fire. For me? It's at least something to pass the time._ **

The two angels nodded.

**_Now go see Yeshua and get yourselves drunk. My orders._ **

They nodded.

Ellaine folded her hands and continued to keep an eye on the shifts in existence. She cared for Death, but sometimes that particular Endless was the multiverse's biggest pain in the ass beyond the likes of Darkseid.

THE SUNLESS LANDS:

The Sunless lands had a strange glowing light that was not of Death's making, the dawn illuminating elements of a vast realm that intersected within not one but many sections of Existence, the things mortals called multiverses. There were nine suns in the realm of Death, and Death herself sought entrance into the no longer sunless region.

She manifested in it, briefly, and saw the nine stars and stared at them in simple bemusement, and then her sigil blazed with a white-hot light and she groaned, falling to her knees. She was weary, still, and in the strange flickering light of strange stars she found herself summoning the kind of shimmering effect that marked her teleportation between realms.

TITANS TOWER MEETING ROOM:

She teleported into the meeting room of Titans Tower, her breath briefly misty from the colds of her realm, her sigil blazing with a light that drowned out the light of the Sun and the lighting within the Tower, briefly, before sinking to her knees. Her realm, the nexus of the afterlives, was no longer sunless, and there was nothing there, all the same. She felt weary again and the weight of her position led to her curling up on herself behind her wings as she closed her eyes and took a few breaths, the teams finishing their goodbyes, the League teleporting away.

By the time the Titans returned, she was on the couch flipping channels and pulling up Mary Poppins, her work-face on full blast. Seeing her smiling and kindly meant that the face and its power to work on the hearts of all who chose to see it as the truth and not what lay beneath it meant that the Titans went to either fly or work in the gym, as she just reclined on the couch for a moment.

She clicked her teeth.

Her wing was recovering, she could feel that the new feathers were growing. Raven still had her bound to her service by fetters of magic more powerful than she knew what to do with....and she was stuck on one of the Fifty-One Earths and barred from her own realm, let alone that of her siblings. She grimaced. Then again a problem billions of years in the making wouldn't be solved by a healing light show, no matter how pretty. She had serious work to do, and she knew how much running into hard limits hurt Dream and how many times she'd seen that happen. Of course she also knew with the fullness of her past just how little of a chance there was of _that_ with her.

Freedom, in another thought that seemed more profound from the mixture of extreme emotions coursing through her in spite of being fairly unoriginal and simple, had a lot of drawbacks. Yet it was there all the same and it was past time she wielded it properly.

APOKOLIPS:

Yuga Khan blinked. A message, in the flames in an old scrying mirror that his son retained from mortal fear of him without realizing why he retained it and what it was.

He smiled coldly. The Goddess Azar, another of the Elder Ones, had returned to her temple as he had to his. The wretched prison constructed by that weak-willed force that rightly took the form of a teenage girl had shattered. The laws that kept out entities like the Goddess Azar and his own kindred of both New Genesis and Apokolips, and the more powerful figures of various planes of Hell had weakened, gravely. He responded to the hail with a message of his own and the Undying Flame in the mirror pulsed in familiarity and contentment at the reunion of old friends.

She too had warned him as Izaya had that he was no match for the Source Wall, and after twice striving for it and twice being clobbered he was at last willing to admit they had a point. He was seldom freed, and he had wasted his first time proving why he'd spent so long locked away as one of the stone guardians imprisoned within the Wall. Now he had a score to settle with the Black Racer, whose frame had vanished when Death of the Endless had become ill, and that had clarified for him a further element of her. He grinned, he would capture the Racer and he would torture it, teach it that none dared tame the lineage of Yuga Khan in fear.

Well, there was the little matter of Death's own child and the kind of temper tantrums the little shit was likely to get into.

He did have something to do there, it would do no good to inherit a domain wrecked by the power of another.

Part of him looked forward to the demonstration of that power and of the nature of that clash.

THE TEMPLE AZARATH, THRONEROOM:

The Goddess Azar, the Undying Flame and bane of Trigon and of his kin, remained on her new throne, observing incidents in the worlds and catching up across the telescoped expanse of time in the lapse since Death had removed her sigil and come to her realm in its infancy. The Temple was remade and reshaped, Azarath enduring in its newer and sharper scale. It had fallen to _him_ , once.

The entity on the throne smiled with a wider grin when she saw the evolution of the recent history of the Earth. Various cult leaders had risen as a dime a dozen. Some, like Brother Blood, blended real power with the old routine. And yet, for all that the Temple of Blood had become subject to a Trigonian sacking, it offered her a prospect, a means to return to the Earth that was not so different to the last time she had spoken in whispers to draw people to her path and to her vision. Then she had offered the prospect of the demise of the arch-demon and in this realm, at least, and in this corner of the multiverse he was no more.

Yet that offered her a deeper chance, for another part of her old vision.

She had seen ancient things in the past, and knew more than most the fragility that lay at the heart of a being whose presence in any event was easily despised, even by her own siblings. Her fingers traced around the rim of a goblet filled with a liquid of origin from another plane, as the history and the strange sequence of crises unfolded. Her eyes rolled at some of the details and what went into elements of the stranger shifts in the material flow of the universe. A wielder of the Speed Force tried and failed to change a detail of the past and produced _that_ kind of change? Ridiculous.

The Speed Force was active, and so were other factions, the war of Chaos and Order had accelerated on a grander scale. She had not been part of either faction, for her origins were in the _Beyond_ and she was not obedient in full to the laws and the motive forces of this dimension. It had been why the power of the Endless in its fuller form helped to serve as a kind of barrier against her kind that prevented her entry, though if she found it, they were not able to do much past that point.

Chaos, Order, Apokolips, New Genesis. Her old friend Yuga Khan resuming his position on his throne, the Guardians of the Universe cycling through a sequence of misfiring fallbacks and ringing Earth with a group of Green Lanterns. Annoying creatures, those Malthusians, but they could be managed, if it came to that.

The old days had passed, Trigon the Terrible had never accepted that even before Death of the Endless unmade him with a word.

Brute force could work if one wielded a sufficiently large hammer (and her eyes flickered to the left of the throne where a vast warhammer of dark green hue adorned by gems of vicious potency gleamed as fresh as the first times she'd conjured it). But it had failed, and would fail, for the heroes were an antibody.

 _ **If that won't work....**_ she mused, I know things that will, and will work smoothly enough.

_**Mortals have always been willing to sell their souls for eternity when they cannot find events to fill an afternoon.** _

In a shimmering mirage-like fashion she vanished from the throneroom, heading to Earth. Azarath would be fine absent her presence, its Goddess had renewed her ties and her power directly, and hallowed it anew. New monks would come and the chants resume.

THE WATCHTOWER:

The Justice League filed in. Raven had chosen to stay in Titans Tower for a time, at least until the events with Death cycled through. None of the team objected to that, as, after all, Raven could teleport from Jump City to the meeting room of the Watchtower in less time than a heartbeat. And even less time than that anywhere on Earth where the gap between light flash and arrival and departure was instantaneous. It had been a very strange few days, and it was still stranger.

Death, one of the Seven, was stuck on their world, though death itself with the small d was inconsistent, in fact near non-existent. The old protocols from the World-Tree Incident (and the Crisis that had preceded it, though they had been forgotten until the World-Tree Incident had shown their continued existence in a paradox that all studiously chose to avoid looking at too deeply) showed that this was now universal across the Fifty-One worlds. Neither death nor birth, though the stars burned anew and the broader functions of the Endless remained intact. Death was stable now, if weak, and there was hope that things would stabilize with her. 

That hope lasted until they reached their own meeting room and saw a bandaged Darkseid standing side by side with Highfather Izaya, and the look on both their faces grave.

TITANS TOWER TRAINING ROOM:

Garfield was busy running as a cheetah on the treadmill, enjoying a great sense of relief that after the dangerous encounters with beings whose omnipotence was at a wholly different kind to the demon Trigon, that his team had something closer to normality. Well, not perfectly normal. Death was an Endless, a kind of cosmic entity whose nature was not altogether clear to him but it didn't need to be. She was stuck on their world and she was staying in the tower with Raven, and evidently was Raven and Starfire's new mutual fling, which didn't bother him that much.

He loved Raven, and he had a feeling part of her, the human part of her, might have wanted monogamy but that part of her wasn't the only thing there. It was silly to be jealous or insecure when the other person's attempts at a more monogamous thing ran afoul of a demonic element that was powerful even before her visit to her new kingdom. He'd taken to calling Raven the Fire Lord, and Raven had zapped him with a bolt of her energy, but other than that there wasn't that much there.

It amused him that the rest of the teams had oscillated between worry and fear and the awareness that if things went wrong that they were mainly 'merely' keeping Jump City intact and its people alive in the wake of collisions with devastating force. 'Merely.' Hah. The most simple and basic element of superheroing and they were free to do that and leaving the fighting to goddamn Satan himself and to Michael Demiurgos.

Cyborg came in with him and the rest of the team did likewise. Donna and Conner let out the stress of the last few days in a rather vicious no-holds barred sparring match that moved with a bewildering speed.

Dick was doing paperwork to line things up with the now-departed Justice League. Poor sorry bastard, stuck with the stuff that was necessary but way too much of a chore and made heroism seem altogether too much like work.

Raven and Starfire were flying, and Death was curled on the sofa, resting and watching of all things Mary Poppins. He wasn't sure if he'dve expected the concept of Death to know pop culture existed, but if he did he certainly wouldn't have believed her to get such genuine enjoyment out of it. Raven had gone in the span of years from the fearful and secretive young woman of the clash with the Gordanians to someone who'd adjusted remarkably well to having an active life at so many levels, not least among them all of this mess.

He went from his cheetah-shift to that of a Sasquatch and a sparring match with Vic, enjoying the chance to test the raw strength of the Red against the strength of the Machine.

Their team now had to be the host of a cosmic entity of enormous power who was weakened, and who had teleported back into their home with a crushed look on her face. Death was not in immediate danger of taking all reality with her, but she was too weak to reach her own realm, and scientists and society had begun to realize that the absence of new births and the ability to conceive them that had lasted for the last few years was real and total, and that death had almost completely halted, with survival of multiple beings hinging on the unpredictable intervention of Gods who more than earned the title as otherwise, the contradictions of various things would have left the world in a kind of state that he couldn't quite comprehend and didn't want to.

God, he needed this. And it was one of the few times where he was grateful he'd run into the Doom Patrol who'd shown him things so much weirder than this that he was still the only one able to roll with it. Even the Nosyarg Kcid and Mxyptlk were chump change.

TITANS ISLAND:

Hob Gadling strode on the island from his rowboat with a smirk. The angel and the demoness were gone.

He'd rather enjoyed meeting Slade Wilson and having a fair bit of fun with him at his expense over his similarities to Deadpool, who he reflected was rather funnier though probably far less easy to get along with. After all the waiting, it would be simple enough. Go to the Tower, and ask the Titans if Immortus was still a Generalsicle or if he'd thawed out. He really, really found superheroes annoying, though less so than the Endless. Well, most of them. All of them, that is, minus Death, who was easy on the eyes and nice, even if she kept asking him if he wanted to take her embrace, and Dream, who was his friend.

He walked calmly up to the tower and rang the doorbell and waited with a smirk on his face. At least this was simple if nothing else had quite worked out that way.


	19. She finds Death quite romantic:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Desire and Delirium stop by to check on their older sister.

TITANS TOWER, MEETING ROOM:

The next morning, Death of the Endless stood before the Titans, in this place that was simultaneously prison and a realm of exile, and a place that she had to live in, and to make the best of it.

She knew more of the Titans now with her body and her being stabilized than she had before, but there was much to see and much to learn.

She spoke words to them the full nature of which meant less than the tone of her voice, than the confidence with which she spoke, than the blessed peace of keeping her wings folded against her, invisible, and not stuck displaying the fullness of her form and her function for the eyes of mortals to see before their time. She owed these mortals much. They gave her a home and a place to recover, and a chance to recuperate.

These were not the words she spoke and the words had a hypnotic power all their own, and even Pride, daughter of Trigon, was not resistant to their power though she had caught her in a binding that had only something to do with it.

She was not truly a member of the Titans, because she was not a superhero, and had no true interest in being one. Yet she was tied, in body and in heart, to Raven, and that made her one of the family that linked the Titans, and in this sense she would stay with them as she recovered.

And....a part of her felt a warmth and an ache that was still a novelty where she looked at Raven and cheeks of bone-hue flushed with awareness of what that heat meant and she stammered a bit, but she had new emotions, novelty. She had not felt anything like this in....a long time....and it would be something that would endure, though these were not part of the words spoken.

With that, things segued neatly into the first day of the new normal, the Titans eating. She did not truly need to eat, for this was not her form in her day of mortal shape, but she did drink, and she decided, after they ate, to go to the kitchen and prepare herself tea.

TITANS TOWER, KITCHEN:

As she did this, she felt two presences taking shape behind her. One of them made her smile sweetly, and for Del's sake she bit back the bile that endured between herself and the other. That one had helped her, in spite of those rifts. Had given her the drink of xir own making that made the pain that much less, pain that was now non-existent, and she still didn't know what to make of it. Death bit her lip as she looked at them, stirring her tea, boot against the cabinet.

 _ **Sister, Desire,** _she nodded.

Del smiled at her but was too shy to say anything, where Desire, being Desire, was not.

_**You look better, sister.** _

_**Thank you, I suppose.**_ The tea looked interesting and it was wonderfully hot and she took a sip of it, cautiously.

She sighed, as they weren't leaving.

_**Well, why are you here?** _

_**I wanted to see how you were doing. I was....wrong about the ease of your recovery. Wrong about a great many things. Destiny told us, told us at least part of the truth. We are not the first versions of us that you have known, are we?** _

Death shook her head.

_**No, you're not.** _

_**Why not tell us this?** _

_**You're my family. I have taken you so many times and it never gets easier, no matter how many universes, no matter how many times. You might not be my first family, but you're the closest I've got.** _

Desire rubbed the back of xir neck.

_**If I had known what they meant to you the incident with the Mer-** _

Death raised a finger and the look in her eyes was murderous and her eyes seemed almost to burn like suns. Desire became very quiet.

_**Do not say that word, or mention that thing in my presence. You tried to help, then, and you made it worse. Now, here?** _

She waved her hand _ **. I'm stuck on this Earth until I get past....this. Seeing you.....hurts. Reminds me of what I've lost already and come so close to losing again.** _

Del went up to her, quietly, and hugged her and Death knelt down beside her sister and hugged her fiercely.

TITANS TOWER, RAVEN'S BEDROOM:

Death took them to the room, the room where it all started to change and showed them her flight feathers.

_**You didn't want them back?** _

_**It makes no difference as long as the command feather exists. Raven can make me do anything she wants. Anyone who controls Raven can, too.** _

Desire looked thoughtful.

_**Does she use that to.....** _

_**To hurt me? No. She wanted to keep her own family safe, the bit of it she has left.** _

Death crossed her arms. Of all motivations, I cannot fault that one. There are other things in it, too, and it's a problem. Michael and Lucifer could have unmade it, if they wanted to take me and the rest of the universe with it and that's a thing we'll have to unpick. And until then, I'm stuck here. Worse places to be stuck. 

Desire quirked xir lip.

**_I suppose so._ **

For a moment the sense of family pervaded Death and she looked at Desire and saw in xir the first Desire all those years ago, the sibling she had loved and at times hated and at other times both at once. A simple clear connection she had seldom and treasured each moment, and gave it pride of place in the tapestries.

_**Dream's keeping an eye on your apartment, so you know. The souls of the dead rest there, until you recover.** _

Del hugged her more tightly.

_DoN'T tAkE tOo LoNg._

_**I'll do my best,**_ Death spoke, and kissed her forehead.

Her siblings vanished while Raven was out visiting her cafe, and Death took the time to ponder if she wished to stay in her room or.....

She strode to talk to Nightwing, only to freeze when she saw a very tall and buxom woman with a bob.

"Hello," she spoke quietly, in English. "My name is Kara Zor-L. I hear you know something about outliving entire multiverses?"

In the Argonian of Kara Zor-L's Krypton in the original Earth-2, of the multiverse destroyed in the first of all the great Crises, Death responded:

**_I know a thing or two about that, yes._ **

ZANDIA, TEMPLE OF BLOOD:

The Goddess Azar materialized in a vast column of flames in the temple, the flames hallowed and a contrast to the hellish light that had been present before in one sense, though not so much in others. She looked around. It was strangely derelict, in a span that no mere span of days could account for, and she strode amidst a group of corpses.

 _ **The Brothers Blood,**_ she mused, her hand brushing against the outer edges of the citadel.

She looked outward, and then raised her right hand, the back of the hand facing the citadel, as light began to blaze around her fist, bringing a brilliant hue to an otherwise dark sphere where light was dulled and meaningless.

Then the fist clenched and fire blazed out and disintegrated the bodies and the mausoleum, a hot wind redolent with various kinds of ashes blazing and sending the smell of ashes out into the Baltic. Older generations shuddered in all too terrible a kind of familiarity that smell and the recognition of corpse-ashes, the Baltics in particular doing so. The younger were puzzled and only later did it make sense.

The Temple that had fallen apart in a process of centuries in days rebuilt itself into a shining citadel of ivory and gold, hard lines suiting more a great fortification for war than a temple. The being that had rebuilt it smiled at so casual a use of her powers (and the streaks of gold and ivory that seemed to slowly spiderweb into the Baltic Sea and from there across land were not seen as what they were, nor what they represented at first).

In another display of her will she sent a call and within hours those who would hear her call came even as they had before, by boats and in a few cases suiting the new era, by planes.

They knelt before her and she began to take the old technology of the Cult of Blood and rebuilt it in another casual display of her powers. In an age where the last sons of the fallen world could throw planets like softballs and light stars with fires that burned from their eyes it was not enough to make her seem a Goddess, which in truth she was and this she knew well. Nor simply the power to read minds for the most powerful metahumans could do so as well.

This did not matter, for while others might mistake her for merely a more powerful metahuman (and this would suit her, in all truth) she did not care.

_**My sons and daughters, first of the new Monastery of Azarath, I have come to you! For a thousand thousand years, I have watched you!** _

_**Who among you shall not relish a world without death? I am the Alpha and the Omega, Eldest and Fatherless, Firstborn of Entropy! Mine the hands that set the stars to burn, and mine the hands that shall take a spear of unyielding iron, and end the tyrannical grasp of death in all its forms. Nekron, who raised the unquiet dead in monstrous form empowered by corrupted rings. Lord Death Man, a jumped up metahuman with an idea that merely possessing power to kill makes him a God! By that standard any mortal flying a plane or releasing the higher yield atom bombs is a God or Goddess! And beyond them all the entity that gives them and sustains their power, for by her existence do they feed and they sustain themselves and wax monstrous to plague the world!** _

_**Death herself shall fall by my hand, and I shall make a world that is a paradise, splendid beyond all reckoning!** _

_**Death shall die, and in her death the age of the Deathless Paradise, an Empire of Azarath, shall remake the very material fabric of the world. One not with Seven fundamental concepts, but six. Even a Deathless realm has much in the way of destruction, for it is the way of stars to destroy themselves and in the process to remake the fabric of existence, the hygiene of Existence itself.** _

_**Monks of Azarath, kneel, and take thine Order, and now, now I say to you that the Demon of old, whom I gathered my first servants to banish is no more and never more shall he be. And as he was unmade, so shall she be, and I shall give to you a world where your every sacred dream shall come true in a paradise of crimson clouds where every building is golden! Where the Soul endures beyond the Body, and can reforge it where the time and the stars are right!** _

As one they knelt, and the Goddess raised her hands, the palms facing them, and light extended from them like tendrils and wrapped its way around them and through them, spearing them and reforging them in the fullness of her power and the destructive force of her strength. They were too far gone to see the way the light in her eyes shone, and the relish she took in the promises and before her the litanies rose as they had not since the hordes of Trigon the Terrible had slain the scions of her last high priestess around her grave-site and left only Trigon's sole daughter, Pride, as their sole legacy. An experiment that had worked and brought the Demon to heel in each world that was touched by the mirror of that enclave, where each shard of Pride in the quantum realm of the multiverse experienced it in their own fashion.

She had met the priestess of Azarath named for the Goddess. Now the Goddess herself was present, and her blessings shone like the Sun.

DEATH'S APARTMENT:

Dream of the Endless looked around. His sister's realm was not quite here, that was the realm that had a light that should not exist. This was a separate space, one she maintained on every world with sapient species in existence, across the multiverse, in a style humble, even spartan by the standard of each given world. He had taken it for granted that she would be here, that absent the one time she had run from her position and left to a distant realm outside the sphere of the multiverse, a small element that belonged to no known sphere. Not of this multiverse, nor any other of his awareness. It was strange, that place. Azarath.

She had gone there to escape, and there the worlds had broken irreparably, for a time and monsters had arisen.

Now she was locked on an Earth, one Earth out of the Fifty-One worlds that were the centers of their multiverse. She would recover, he believed it firmly, no....he knew it. She was stronger than he was, and Burgess's best efforts had not broken him. Her function continued, she was taking souls, souls that crowded here and made it unrecognizable. It was a vast place in all truth, not one that he was fully adept to recognize in this sense. Vaster than his own palace, a place to hold, for a time, the souls of all the dead who would go to afterlives that were fraying and weakening from absence of new force and souls sent to them.

it was a place that thronged with people and his servants of the Dreaming provided feasts that would not be drained and means to keep the souls occupied. It was something he could do for his sister. Part of him smiled a cryptic smile at the sight of the souls that came to a place that was familiar and safe and welcoming. His sister might feel the weariness of an existence they had only understood in part but she had built a rarity, a place of stupendous power that felt warm and welcoming to those who knew what it was, and whose realm it was. He hoped that as she recovered while locked on that Earth that she would come to see that this place was not merely a thing she built as her function, it was the truth of who she was and what she was.

For now, there was simply Dream of the Endless as the caretaker of his sister's realm. He knew of the room with the tapestry, for the rare occasions where Death slept and dreamed, he had seen it, and what it contained. The love and the grief, and it humbled him to realize that his sister loved them all that deeply and that no details of their lives would be lost in any given universe. The lives and deeds of the Endless more eternal than the Book of Destiny, though mortals appeared only as they were noted to the Endless. He would have to talk to her about that, sometime, when she was in a position to have that talk. That would come later.

He smiled at the sight and relaxed against a wall as two of the superheroes who had had particularly unfortunate timing and experiences at the hands of a ray that weaponized time were in an argument with another ordinary mortal who insisted that they were cosplayers and would not believe any amount of evidence provided.


	20. 'Not unless you mail them to me at Desolation Row'.

THE SOURCE WALL:

At last, after a span of billions of years confined by the Celestial Giants wrought anew in stone, forever screaming in silent mouths, she was awake, and free. Mother had not imprisoned her, then. Mother loved her. Mother was proud of her, of her taking the power bequeathed to her to remake the universe. Her existence was fully awakened, and the twin voices that had spoken to her had whispered things, that her mother felt weary and exhausted and needed a break, and wouldn't be so helpful if she could traverse to Earth-48 and to give her mother help and a rest.

Perpetua stood in the midst of the crack in the Source Wall, and raised her hands in the fullness of her triumph and her awakening, eyes opening and flashing with a terrible light.

Her hand reached out to grasp the distant light of the Promethean Galaxy and beyond it by an infinite span far beyond that understanding of mortals but within an eye's glimpse to her.

_**I am coming, Mother. Soon, we shall be reunited.** _

CHURCH OF BLOOD, NEW YORK CITY:

This building too had become derelict since the Titans had exposed the Cult of Blood in the shadowy years between the clash with the Brotherhood of Evil and the seeming resurrection of Brother Blood from his more cybernetic shape. When the first in Zandia was reborn, this one was reshaped as it had been. From a new network of followers whose priests adapted strangely avian and familiar kinds of hoods, new messages began to spread.

_All are one in the Azar, a world of deathless paradise, unity beyond life and death, forever young and ever-blessed with dreams made real._

The fear of a world without children, and of living to grow old in a world that would die when the youngest person reached old age and shuffled off the form of flesh gave the message ready ears to hear.

Already the new name was spreading, Azar, Goddess of the Deathless Paradise, and the cult would spread more rapidly than that of Brother Blood before it. Desperate times left people searching for answers, and not questioning how buildings that were rotted and covered with roaches and rodent feces had suddenly been remade into opulent golden places that where the equally desperate and poor had sought to try to make off with some of the gold had displayed a sudden and horrific power to deter.

THE DOOR TO EARTH-48, GATES OF LIFE AND DEATH:

The doors of the outer elements of the nexus of realities, a gateway for mortals visit the Sunless Lands in a fashion their minds were geared to understand, were vast. Human hands had not wrought them, a concept given a voice and a form had. She had labored on this as repentance for the last time she'd had her little spate of hating her job and trying to leave it. Now, Surtr, King of Muspelheim, stood before the door, a being of lava and magma, with a great sword in a scabbard by his side.

 **I've always hated your works, Hel,** he mused to himself. **Forever pitying yourself for the shame of outliving your worlds. A gift given to you beyond measure and this how you repaid it twice.**

The great sword emerged from its scabbard and his power surged into it and the runes on it blazed into light and he merely placed the edge along the doors, a priceless work of Death of the Endless marked with her ankh. The blade burned ever more brightly and the door became molten and weak, and he smiled with the beauty of destruction unleashed unhindered.

Placing the sword within its scabbard he then shoved with his shoulder and the door fell down, and he gazed outward into the universe defined by its Earth, to the Yggdrassil just east of the Muspelheim in this world.

 **Now I know where I'm going,** he gloated.

**Try to deny me my role, will you, Allfather? Then I shall make fate come true!**

With that Surtr flexed his wrists and shifted his form slightly to seem merely a very large human with glowing eyes, like a version of Mongul wrought out of molten magma. It would not do to march in with his full power quite like this, not until he'd found both Odin and the Endless whose great work he'd leveled here, making now two of them ruined. 

_This_ was going to be _fun!_


End file.
